|
Magazines
The mobile phone manPosted by Banyue, February 8, 2007 10:34 AM
According to statistics from China's telecoms regulator MII (Ministry of Information Industry), there are over 426 million mobile phone users in China, the biggest user group in the whole world. The cover story of the latest New Weekly (新周刊) is all about this group.
The feature includes interviews with nine people who apparently represent the diverse uses mobile-obsessed urban Chinese have for their phones: Li Su, a mobile Internet fanatic, often uses the Internet on her mobile. She has followed a basketball match on her phone. She would like to be able to write a 2,000 character blog post and publish it just using her mobile. Wu Guohua, a manager of a household appliance retail chain, collects different kinds of mobile phones as a hobby. He has gathered more than 30 phones from 1995, and kept them carefully. Most of them still can be used. Wang Xu, a postgraduate student, likes to disassemble phones to see how they work. Hua Feng has changed his mobile phone every month since 2002. "Aside from food, I spend almost all my money on changing phones." Yin Xiaobei and Wu Ying are lovers who like to send each other text messages by mobile phone, sometimes as many as 3,000 a month. They also quarrel by SMS. Li Fang is a freelance photographer who owns 20 mobile phones: he gives different mobile phone numbers to different girls he meets. This rather fluffy feature article was sponsored by Motorola. Links and Sources
|
Partner Links
Jobs in China
Recent Comments
HaiTek on
Chinese in Argentina
Sam Voutas on
Taxi vs Taxi
animal rig on
Cats and dogs in the animal cruelty law
Paul Jones on
Bankrupt schools and their fleeing foreign bosses
Chris/Kati on
Reserve a ticket on the 2012 ark through Taobao!
China Media Timeline
Major media events over the last three decades
Danwei Model Workers
![]() Recommended blogs and new media
Books on China
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.
Front Page of the Day
A different newspaper every weekday
From the Vault
Classic Danwei posts
+ People: Chen Daming, director (2004.06): Chen's own life story could be rich material for a feature film. After being rusticated from the Henan Opera School, he was forced to move away from Kaifeng to look for work. The Film Academy is the most prestigious film school in China, counting the directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige among its alumni, and competition for place to study there is fierce. Chen Daming came to Beijing for an audition, and was accepted after three auditions. + Mo Luo: Turning enemies into people (2009.06): Mo Luo, an essayist and poet, writes about dehumanizing the enemy. + Skirting the law in China's private enterprise reform (2006.05): An essay by Wu Xiaobo (吴晓波), 'Reform Begins with Transgression' (改革从违法开始), about how early Chinese private enterprise dealt with a vague legal framework.
Danwei Archives
Danwei Feeds
Via Feedsky
or Feedburner |





Comments on The mobile phone man
Let's see now, we've got mobile phones sponsoring addictive behaviour, mobile phones enabling caddish behaviour, mobile phones enabling antisocial behaviour...
Quite an article!
Does anyone use mobile phones to _make phonecalls_?! I feel oddly unfashionable, all of a sudden...
>Does anyone use mobile phones to _make phonecalls_?! I feel oddly unfashionable, all of a sudden...
Go to a cinema, you'll see plenty of people doing just that.
for my money, New Weekly is the best magazine in China. It always has interesting and timely articles that look at the culture of China, but talks to people all over the country and not just in BJ/SH/GZ.
This sort of gadget obsession is pretty simple to witness on the subway where most young people who are alone are tuning out either using their phone or listening to mp3 players.