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Business and Finance
2008, that magic yearPosted by Joel Martinsen on Saturday, July 9, 2005 at 11:33 PM
![]() Blocking the sun on a bus. Riding a bus in Beijing during the summertime is not necessarily the kind of pleasant experience one expects out of mass transit. Even if you aren't worried about tanning your carefully nourished white skin, it can get pretty uncomfortable under the blazing sun. Relief will arrive by 2008, when the remaining half of Beijing's buses will have been fitted with tinted windows. Curtains, unfortunately, are a safety hazard. On Thursday, Beijing's Mirror printed a letter to the editor from a citizen asking why it would take two-and-a-half years to swap out glass or apply tinted film. An excellent question. The Olympics in 2008 seem to provide a more tangible deadline for public projects; 2008 somehow feels more real than either 2007 or 2009. A comparison of Baidu search results for the string "北京xxxx年前" ("Beijing before xxxx") gives 1350 hits with 2008 as the year, 117 with 2007, and absolutely none with 2009. 2010, a rounder, more pleasing number, turns up 180 hits. Other permutations of the phrase lead to similar results. So what all is going to be completed before 2008? Danwei brings you eleven more projects, so including those tinted windows, we have a full dozen things to look forward to before the Olympics. Before 2008...
There is, of course, no guarantee that any of these will be completed on schedule. Links and Sources
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Big in China: An adapted excerpt from Big In China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising A Family, Playing The Blues and Becoming A Star in China, just published this month. Author Alan Paul tells the story of arriving in Beijing as a trailing spouse, starting a blues band, raising kids and trying to make sense of China.
Pallavi Aiyar's Chinese Whiskers: Pallavi Aiyar's first novel, Chinese Whiskers, a modern fable set in contemporary Beijing, will be published in January 2011. Aiyar currently lives in Brussels where she writes about Europe for the Business Standard. Below she gives permissions for an excerpt.
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+ Korean history doesn't fly on Chinese TV screens (2007.09): SARFT puts the kibbosh on Korean historical dramas. + Religion and government in an uneasy mix (2008.03): Phoenix Weekly (凤凰周刊) article from October, 2007, on government influence on religious practice in Tibet. + David Moser on Mao impersonators (2004.10): I first became aware of this phenomenon in 1992 when I turned on a Beijing TV variety show and was jolted by the sight of "Mao Zedong" and "Zhou Enlai" playing a game of ping pong. They both gave short, rousing speeches, and then were reverently interviewed by the emcee, who thanked them profusely for taking time off from their governmental duties to appear on the show.
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