Oh dear. This is a disaster. I haven’t written anything for a month!

Now is when I have to come up with some good excuse.  Like:  Spring has finally come to China; I have been travelling a bit in the dusty real-sphere of Shanxi; a band of homeland friends cheerfully invaded Shanghai, bringing with them some good Rioja wine.

The cat got my blog, what.

Of course, the real blogging spirit never dies. The blogger mind is a highly evolved mechanism, constantly absorbing stimuli from the environment and processing them into hot controversy.  When not at the computer, he will continue to blog the pub over the old pint of Tiger, moderating the comments of his table-mates whom he suddenly addresses as “subscribers”…   This behaviour led to some critical situations, and soon several of my friends were inviting me to kindly  get back online. At my earliest convenience.

And now that I’m back, the creepy thought:  what has China been up to all this time? 

Be advised, reader, that I haven’t opened a newspaper for the last 3 weeks. This is more than enough for a  fast country like China to change itself beyond recognition. For all I know, we are still in a socialist system with Chinese characteristics, governed by a mysterious CPC oligarchy, still doing quite OK  in a World crisis that somebody else started, and glad to point this out at every possible occasion. God, last time I checked we were asking the US to dump the dollar and start using some World wide currency. Like in Star Trek!

I hope I can get back in the loop over the weekend, and normal service will resume promptly.  Thanks for sticking around.

Today it was a calm morning, the perfect Sunny day to take a long lunch break like we do back in homeland. So at midday sharp I took my bike and rode over to my new favourite reading spot. It is a bright, silent cafe, where reading is the main part of the menu.  I am into a great book at the  moment — I will write about it soon.

The place is called in English “The Old China Hand”, and I find this funny, because the atmosphere has little to do with China hands, but rather with tea-drinking ladies and nerdy bookworms. Perhaps it’s a good example of the connotation of a word being lost in translation. It is a Chinese cafe, but their coffee is not bad.

Click to continue »

“The country is changing so fast!” , this is one of the things I usually say back home  to explain why I find living in China so exciting. Today my street has changed very fast indeed.   Linder was lucky enough to spend the night in the garden, but other bikes where not so lucky. Inexorably engulfed by the waves of development.

Click to continue »

Another one by the cell phone scam-buster.

Take a look at the picture. This baby beeped into my life the other day at 4am, just as I was getting ready to switch into deep sleep. I knew it was spam, but I couldn’t help the reflex. I stretched out one arm, opened one eye and mentally translated as follows:

“Do you want to know the content of somebody’s cell phone conversations? Just send us the person’s number, my company will do a  special card for you. Using this card you will be able to listen to all his calls. For complete info dial: etc.”

My first reaction of course was to run for my business cards drawer and pick a couple of cards from the section “competition”. If it is a public service it cannot be immoral, I thought, and they got it well deserved, those sneaky competitors who go around trying to snitch our projects.

But then I woke up a bit more and suddenly remembered: I am in China, and it is another one of those sms.  So I just mentally marked it for my blog collection and I went back to bed. Before I closed my eyes I still had the time to draw the follwing conclusions:

1. This cannot possibly be true.  If it were, China Mobile would be facing thousands of lawsuits .
2. But then, if there is one place in the World where this might be true, it is right here.
3. Either way, the author is clever. I am sure there are loads of people out there calling the number right now. Nothing is more tempting than to know what you shouldn’t know…

So we will probaby be receiving more of these. And like I usually say in these cases: if there’s anyone out there willing to test the service for CNY, please go for it and let us know in comments.

Volunteers earn a free VIP subscription.

My anonymous friend N. has sent in this picture recently taken in an underground station in Shanghai Xuhui. It is a poster depicting a (Kazakh?) horseman riding with a baby just at the moment when a Shanghai policeman has engaged him in a vicious exchange of toothiness.

Government slogans are some of the phrases that I find most difficult to translate from Chinese, perhaps because they don’t usually make sense.  Anyway, here is my take:  “Policemen harmoniously build peace”. And the three sub-slogans on top:  “Penetrate the bases”,  “Penetrate reality”, “Penetrate the masses”.

Yeah, said like this, it sounds like something out of 1984, but that’s only if you are not used to Chinese government slogans. This is a PR campaign that has been done many times before in China. The objective is to show the police close to the people, as explained in this old article in the Xuhui district website.

We already saw some similar campaigns in late 2008, and more are sure to come this year, as the government takes every possible measure to avert risks of instability.

On the other hand, I am not sure how necessary this is. From my own observations, policemen here don’t have the bad image they have in some places in the West. They tend to be quite humble, they rarely use violence, and they get yelled at by the citizens they are supposed to protect. More than once I’ve had them visit my house at midnight, just to shyly ask us to please turn down the music and try to not let more people in if we don’t mind.

So  I have to say that, at least in Shanghai, the government has done a good job of managing police PR. Even I find it hard to believe that it is this same 公安 (police)  who arrests activists and bloggers,  the same who kicks villagers out of their old houses marked for destruction.

Wow, there’s been some activity around here this week. It is exhausting to be in the limelight, and I long to get back my status of internet chopped liver.

But no worries, I think I know just how to do that:

Make up your mind: N.1 or N.2?

Everybody knows that serious China bloggers don’t do Chinglish. That’s for newbies, and we are past the “mamma, look what I got” stage. But before you leave, take a look at this a pic I took yesterday on my way to Ningbo . It is now part of my new classified collection of Signology. And there’s more here than meets the eye. Click to continue »

Ever since I opened this blog the problem of credibility has been in the back of my mind. These days, the comments of a tenacious part-time troll, as well as some recent events that shook the Chinosphere have brought back the subject to the top of my agenda.

It is well known that Chinablogs* (defined as blogs about China in English) are only a tiny part of the Chinese internet, and their readership is insignificant compared to their Chinese counterparts. But it would be a mistake to dismiss them as irrelevant. For some time already, especially after last year’s  events – Tibet revolts and the Olympic torch saga were a turning point -  readers from all sides have questioned the media’s impartiality regarding Chinese politics. Just or not, the fact is that these accusations have cast a doubt, and many have turned to blogs to try to find an independent point of view.

Some things make me suspect that the influence of Chinablogs in shaping the World opinion about China is more significant than their size might suggest. The famous #cde affair, where a well known entrepreneur and blogger in China caused the RMB/dollar exchange to move after a post on his blog, forcing the Chinese government to issue an official notice, confirmed this idea. Also, the world media are sending some of their best writers to China, not to become correspondents as used to be the case, but to open a blog and speak about what they  see outside their window – among other things.  Blog sceptics might want to look at this Boston Globe article to see just how influential blogs can become.

And here is where my question comes in: what legitimates  Chinabloggers to give opinions about this country, its politics, economy and other fields that affect the well being of billions of people?  Where does our credibility lie? Are we misrepresenting ourselves as experts in China without any serious basis? Click to continue »

Finally, we have a new blogger in the community who has moved all the way to South America to bridge-blog about the Chinese expansion there and other interesting stuff.

Tom Pellman is Double Handshake. He was an editor in a well known economics magazine in Shanghai, he is almost trilingual in Chinese and he is now in Peru to see that Latin America’s largest population of Chinese are enjoying their Pisco.

Have you noticed that, in China, most of the people you hear speaking Spanish are not European, but overwhelmingly Latin American? Did you ever wonder why so many Chinese are flocking to the Salsa Dancing schools, and why in Shanghai there is a latin night scene more active than the one in Barcelona, for example?

Well, in some places, language is not the only means of communication. And if you want to smell the Juan Valdes, you better keep and eye on these two continents, because things are moving fast under our very noses.

Double Handshakes.

I have a bunch of friends back in Spain who are always quick to send me the juiciest China news coming up over there, and to supervise that I’m fulfilling my duties as a bridge blogger.

This time I have received a couple of links from Spanish newspapers El Pais and El Mundo where there is evidence of at least two different Chinese industries that continue their cheerful expansion to the West in spite of the World Crisis: These are the industries of Shady Barber Shops and Mahjong Gambling Dens. Fourteen of them have been closed down in a recent police raid in Barcelona.

These are the two articles, one very recent, one from last year:

In recent months local residents of the districts of Eixample, Sants-Montjuïc, Gràcia, Horta-Guinardó and Sant Martí, had brought to the police their suspicions that many hairdressers opened recently by Chinese citizens were something more than to cut and dye hair.

Yes, how perspicacious. I never knew of these things  during the three years I lived in Barcelona. For linguistic reasons I had quite a few friends in the Chinese migrant community over there and I frequented the Chinese areas of the city. As far as I know these FDIs must be very recent.

Anyway, so much for the Chinese hairdressers’ expansion. Although gambling and prostitution are not among the Rights that this blogs stands for,  I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for those Chinese that see their  business seized by the police. Something must have gone wrong with their otherwise perfectly profitable business model. Perhaps they didn’t remember to “glocalize instead of globalize”. Perhaps the local police superintendent is not keen on Asian chicks, or maybe they chose the wrong hand to oil. Who knows.

The New Iceland?

Since we are at it, and on a completely different subject, check out below this scary chart of Spanish unemployment that newspaper El Correo published this week. Two little thoughts:

First, I am seriously afraid that Spain is going to turn into the next Iceland. The growth of these last years was so based on the real estate bubble that troubles could be smelled all the way from China. Am I going to turn into a poor immigrant in Shanghai working my ass off to send money back to homecountry? It would be an interesting role reversal, after all the Chinese I met doing exactly that in Barcelona. Oh well, it was  inevitable at some point, I guess, I just never imagined it could come so soon.

Second, as an engineer I note again how numbers and charts are powerful tools of manipulation. The chart below  goes so high on the Y axis that it almost needs logarithmic scales to fit in the paper. A mere problem of the units chosen, of course… or of the number of copies the newspaper wishes to sell.

Inversely, it would be very easy to make this graph look flatter with a more harmonious  objective in mind… CCTV, take note, you might consider hiring a specialist like me to re-engineer your charts and numbers for harmonious results. But then, what do they care, they simply would not publish the negative charts.

(yes, it is CCTVbashing week this week)

Last night I was going to stay in and write a long, thoughtful post. Instead I went out and took some pictures.

The first full moon marks the end of the New Year celebrations. It is called 元宵节, usually known in English as the Night of the Lanterns. Apart from the lanterns, there are also fireworks. And of course, like in every festival in China, there is a special thing to eat:  the 汤圆 or 元宵，AKA the sticky rice balls.

I also captured some of the 牛Year’s 牛s，flashing bravely on Yunan Road.

Below is a whole family of 牛s, looking Holy in their neon halo.

More lamps. Have you noticed how the paper lamps, with their older technology, actually decorate the streets much better than neon strings? Ancient Chinese were smart. Homeland Christmas decorators: take note.

And one last for the little Chinese street guitar session.

This is a bit of a silly post, I know, and I’m sure it has been done before. But I had to do it anyway. Yesterday I finally remembered to take a picture of my favourite sign in Shanghai, the Rules of the Green Administration Bureau.

It is the one that prohibits feudal behaviours, expects visitors not to shit, strictly bins comping, gawbling and gombing, and generally limits, with a rich variety of forbidding synonyms – existing or invented-  all the favourite Sunday activities of us mental patients escaped from custody.

You can still find these signs in most parks, even in central locations like People’s Square. Note they are collectable items, each park provididing a new variation on the theme with different combinations of letters. They will probably dissapear sometime in the next 500 days of Expo countdown, so let this be a last tribute.

And since we are at it, I will post some more of the great sign watching session we had yesterday in Luxun Park. This park is absolutely recommended for a Sunday stroll, it contains one of the highest concentrations of culture and local life in the city. It sparkles like pearls from Heaven. Really Splendid.

Around the center of the park there is a little house which, on one of its four sides, has been decorated to look like a romantic Greek Villa. It is a haven of romantic notions.

And one can’t help but wonder: what would nearby poet Petofi have to say of all this?

But you need not worry. If you didn’t like the poem, there are many more to be read on the Greek corner at Luxun. My favourite is the one below: “Romantic Person”. And the best of all is: It is served Daily!

And now, here’s the riddle of the day. The first one to guess it will win an exclusive 6 month VIP membership to Chinayouren:  Name the original greek myth that inspired the poem “Romantic Person”. (No cheating with google!)

Leave your answer below.

Here is the illustrated report of our Fujian trip. Today I present some clear symptoms of blogorrhea after my 5 day internet abstinence. So we’ll try to keep it ruly and live up to my Bull Year’s resolutions. I am applying the special astringent potion: Max 5 words per picture. The rest in your imagination: 一切尽在不言中.

Every village had a church

热闹 means Hot and Noisy!

The temples were 热闹

The faithful like burning stuff

The mosque was less 热闹

Love Church was not 热闹

Beach of the Grande Jatte

No! Muslims don’t eat porc

We met an electric fisherman

Administration + Participation = Administpation

Hate those noisy cracker vandals

Shooting and Bumpers: Safety first

Ming Walled Chongwu is Magnetic

Let’s get chicken at EFC’s!

No! my chicken at CBC’s!

Ah, finally: it’s a KFC’s!

Macdonalds + Kentucky’s = Mac-Ken-Ji’s !!

Mac-Ken-Ji’s: Children’s playground, Grandpa’s shrine

Fairy houses made of seashells

发展 wave engulfs the past

Model Street Award: Zero Imitations

I

My polos always at Coddle’s

Model Workers Instruction: Model Street