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Danwei Picks
Donuts and guidebooks full of holesPosted by Joel Martinsen, April 16, 2008 6:12 PM
Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China). Mmm. . .doughnuts: China Economic Review brings good news for doughnut lovers on the mainland: While Dunkin' and Mr Donut duke it out in Shanghai, the last member of the global doughnut trifecta, Krispy Kreme, is looking to take its heavily-glazed, deep-fried rings to Shenzhen. See also: Donut Factory doesn't fill Shanghai's big donut hole at Shanghaiist
Time after time LP books make only the vaguest gestures at useful directions or transport information. Time after time they say there's no public transport when there is. Time after time it's plain from the text that hearsay is being used. I once used to know one of the LP China authors who told me quite frankly that if he found he'd forgotten a phone number he'd just make it up. There wasn't time to go back and they weren't paying him enough to bother. And in effect, since he had not a word of Mandarin, he couldn't have used the telephone or printed references to find out even if he could have been bothered.
I prefer the term "Red Guard 2.0" for the sort of netizens who have been hounding the guy who isn’t Lobsang Gendun, since they have Google Maps and websites and newfangled technology. And I especially reserve that title those who have been targeting Wang Qianyuan of Duke University and even more terrifyingly her poor parents in Qingdao, all because she, a Han Chinese girl, crossed the picket line and ended up in a photograph standing on the Pro-Tibet side of one protest. Some people are publishing photos of the building and front door of her parents apartment as part of the campaign to catch the "race traitor". It doesn’t seem much of an exaggeration to compare them to the Red Guard - issue them an armband tomorrow and they’re off to the races.
China is shocked by and strongly condemns CNN host Jack Cafferty's remarks, which maliciously attacked the Chinese people, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular press briefing on Tuesday. |
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Tales of Old Hong Kong: The new Tales of Old Hong Kong compiled by Derek Sandhaus is available at Earnshaw Books.
Diamond Hill by Feng Chi-shun: Feng's memoir Diamond Hill describes an era of gambling and gangsters, Suzie Wong and squatter villages, fires and food stalls, and the Kowloon Walled City and its white powder. "A time when people were poor, but life was rich," he says. The world that he grew up in no longer exists, but his book - the first ever on the Diamond Hill refugee settlement, in either Chinese or English - offers a candid picture of what life was like for most Hong Kong residents in the 1950s.
William A. Callahan's China: The Pessoptimist Nation: China: The Pessoptimist Nation shows how the heart of Chinese foreign policy is not a security dilemma, but an identity dilemma. Through a careful analysis of how Chinese people understand their new place in the world, the book charts how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings in a dynamic that intertwines China's domestic and international politics.
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+ Lost in Beijing finally gets killed (2008.01): SARFT (广电总局) brings down the hammer on Lost in Beijing (苹果), one year after its offense. + People: Tina Liu (2004.09): Tina Liu is Hong Kong's most prominent image stylist, but her mercurial career has involved her in almost every aspect of Hong Kong's media world. + Asimov Published, Interviewed in Beijing (2005.03): Cover story from this week's Book Review section of The Beijing News announces the publication of a Chinese translation of Isaac Asimov's complete Foundation series. Yup, the Beijing News has scored a fictional interview with "I, Asimov". They've been taking similar liberties recently in their entertainment sections, captioning photographs of celebrities with made-up quotes.
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Comments on Donuts and guidebooks full of holes
Jim would be Jim McAleer. I went to school with his kids.
Lonely Planet guidebooks :
The question is if we need travel guides in 2008, when we have fellow travelers on-line that are more up to date than a book who was edited 2 years ago. In the case of backpacker places, not once I have found myself following the recommendation of "Lonely Planet" just to find out that the place has lost its reputation longtime ago. With TripAdvisor, WAYN and http://www.triptouch.com , one can find very easily up to date recommendations, travel mates and all the travel info one's need to get oriented while traveling .
Travel guides need to adjust to the new era, minimize their books size and be more up to date if they want to survive the travel 2.0 era.