7 posts tagged “china”
The following tips were collected from a Facebook group named "You Know You've Lived in China Too Long When...". Perfectly funny. Enjoy it~!
1. You’re at an expensive western restaurant and don’t even notice the guy at the next table yelling into his cell phone
2. You enjoy karaoke
3. You walk backwards in the park listening to a transistor radio
4. The China Daily is your source for hard hitting, fast breaking, investigative journalism
5. You smoke in crowded elevators.
6. All white people look the same to you
7. You like the smell of the bus.
8. You find state-employed retail staff helpful, knowledgeable and friendly
9. You no longer need tissues to blow your nose
10. You find western toilets uncomfortable
11. You throw your used toilet paper in the basket (as a courtesy to the next person)
12. You think that the heavy air actually contains valuable nutrients that you need to stay healthy
13. You think a 30 year old woman who carries a Hello Kitty lunch box is cute
14. A sexual pervert is a man who prefers women to money.
15. It’s OK to throw rubbish, including old fridges, from your 18th-floor window
16. You believe that pressing the lift button 63 times will make it move faster
17. You aren’t aware that one is supposed to pay for software
18. You are not surprised to see your tap water run dark brown
19. You tell your parents their house back in your home country has bad feng shui
20. You think that a $7 shirt is a rip-off
21. You always leave tray and trash on the table when you are in Starbucks because you insisted it is the way to keep everyone employed
22. You buy an XXXL T-shirt in store when you returned home
23. You take large sum of cash whenever you go hospital in home country
24. You have no reservations about spitting sun flower seeds on the restaurant floor
25. You think it’s silly to buy a new bike when it’ll get stolen soon and stolen bikes are half the price.
26. You’d rather pay the 10 yuan for an all night stay at the internet cafe than the 30 for a taxi home.
27. You feel cheated if you don’t receive a full head and shoulder massage when getting a haircut
28. You blow your nose or spit on the restaurant floor (of course after making a loud hocking noise)
29. You no longer wait in line, but go immediately to the head of the queue
30. It becomes exciting to see if you can get on the lift before anyone can get off
31. It is no longer surprising that the only decision made at a meeting is the time and venue for the next meeting
32. You no longer wonder how someone who earns US$ 400.00 per month can drive a Mercedes
33. You accept the fact that you have to queue to get a number for the next queue
34. You believe everything you read in the local newspaper
35. You have developed an uncontrollable urge to follow people carrying small flags
36. You regard it as part of the adventure when the waiter correctly repeats your order and the cook makes something completely different.
37. You are not surprised when three men with a ladder show up to change a light bulb
38. You look over people’s shoulder to see what they are reading
39. You honk your horn at people because they are in your way as you drive down the sidewalk
40. When car accidents become a source of heartwarming humour
41. When shopping at Carrefour some laowai stares you down for catching you looking into his basket while you wonder to yourself what laowai’s eat
42. You have figured out that it is actually the Taiwanese who are running this country
43. You have a pinky fingernail an inch long
44. You burp in any situation and don’t care
45. You start to watch CCTV9 and feel warm and comforted by the governments great work
46. You think Pizza Hut is high-class and worth queueing for
47. You have learnt how to detect someone is in a hurry behind you, and now have the ability to not only walk very slowly but also grow eyes in the back of your head, so when they start to overtake on the right hand side, you automatically cut in and walk very slowly directly in front of them
48. When you are able to jump the queue because the idiot laowai left 2 centimeters between themself and the person in front of them
49. You have absolutely no sense of traffic rules
50. You start calling other foreigners Lao Wai
51. You start cutting off large vehicles on your bicycle
52. The last time you visited your mother, you gave her your business card
53. You think no car is complete without a tissue box on the rear shelf and a feather duster in the trunk
54. You go to the local shop in pajamas
55. When looking out the window, you think “Wow, so many trees!” instead of “Wow, so much concrete!”
56. Pollution, what pollution?
57. You think “white pills, blue pills, and pink powder” is an adequate answer to the question “What are you giving me, doctor?”
58. Someone doesn’t stare at you and you wonder why
59. Firecrackers don’t wake you up
60. Your family stops asking when you’ll be coming back
61. You wear out your vehicle’s horn before its brakes
62. You buy a top-of-the-line karaoke machine
63. Forks feel funny
64. Chinese remakes of Western songs sound better than the originals
65. You get homesick for Chinese food when away from China
66. You realize that smiling and nodding is Chinese body language for, “Go away; leave me alone.”
67. All the top-level government officials you befriended for guanxi purposes when you first arrived are retired and living in your country
68. After being in an accident, you tell the ambulance driver which hospital to take you to
69. Your company offers you a job in your native land, and includes regular “Home Leave” to China as an incentive
70. You think of “salad” as diced apples in mayonnaise
71. You don’t bother to take the sticker off the lenses of your fake Ray-Bans
72. You only wear a suit when you dig ditches or do home repairs
73. Your handshake is weakening by the day
74. You compiled a 3-page list of weird English first names that Chinese people of your acquaintance have chosen for themselves.
75. Your collection of business cards has outgrown your flat
76. You and a friend get on a bus, sit at opposite ends of the bus, and continue your conversation by yelling from one end to the other
77. You cannot say a number without making the appropriate hand sign
78. You like the taste of Green Tea and Chivas
79. You start recognising the chinese songs on the radio and sing along to them with the taxi driver
80. You feel insulted when you enter a restaurant and only three waiters welcome you
Show us a picture that's worth a thousand words.
Submitted by sami711.
What makes YouTube so popular? Probably, the copyrighted materials - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The South Park, and other latest TV shows from all around the world. Though the content makers have asked YouTube to remove them over and over, users keep uploading the unauthorized videos day after day.
But in China, the we-will-be-the-next-YouTube websites can do much more than their American precedent. As a Chinese Web 2.0 entrepreneur tole me, "the foreign executives must be very 'jealous' of the copyright situation in mainland China." Copyrighted videos online? Who cares.
It's such a good news for the websites, and doubtless, better for the mainland Internet users.
Nowadays, open a Chinese video sharing website, type the title of your favorite show, click on the search button, and in less than one second, a result page with every single episode of the show will come up on your screen. Take ouou.com as an example, you can watch the the episodes which was premiered in America yesterday - 24, Prison Break, and teenagers' favorite sci-fi show in this season, Heroes.
What's more, there is no downloading process which belongs to the BitTorrent/KaZaA age, no Ads bothering you from the beginning to the end, and the most important, there is no language gap and cultural crash any more. In mainland, fans with extraordinary translating skills started making Chinese subtitles once they got the videos from the Internet. After the Episode 1, Season 2 of Prison Break came out in August 2006, the first video with Chinese subtitle was finished and uploaded in less than 7 hours.
And for some shows which require in-depth knowledges of American culture, there are footnotes among the subtitle. Especially in the show Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip, footnotes help Chinese audience understand the jokes about Hollywood history and American politicians. How can Chinese fans spell the weird names correctly? The embed English subtitles for HDTV programs were recorded and sent to the translating group in mainland.
So, even the networks import some famous shows, no one will watch them. Because the official versions always contain many translating mistakes, the terribly dubbed episodes always drive the viewers crazy, and the die-hard young fans have seen them online before. Last year, CCTV, the biggest governmental network imported Despaired Housewives, and the rates were incredibly low.
I don't think it's a Only-In-China affair. On the YouTube's Most Viewed page, you
can find some Japanese cartoon with English subtitles episodes from
time to time. They are also the fans' masterpieces. I read an article
about it on Fortunes magazine. But it said that if the official
versions are bought by American networks, the translating groups will
stop by themselves immediately.
In the winter of 2003, Microsoft held a contest to collect videos on innovation from the college students all around the world. The grand prize is a free trip to Brazil and US$5000 for the team, and the deadline is May 1st, 2004. (You can see a Windows logo at the end the opening animation. ^_^ )
My friend Martin forwarded the contest page to me, and without hesitating, we joined in. After several months' preparing, writing, filming, and editing, we finished and uploaded it to Microsoft's website on the last day of April, 2004.
What happened then? A big surprise. On May 1st, one Microsoft technical guy sent an email to me and told me that, the .rar file cannot be extracted correctly. And what's more, it was too late to upload it again.
Though the dream of a free trip to Brazil has never come true, we are still proud of this video. It was made by some guys who didn't major in film in the campus days.
Fortunately, half a year later, we won a grand prize for this Video in a contest sponsored by Intel. The award was a Sony laptop and some coolest digital stuffs back to the days.
And you know what, the biggest 'surprise' during the days we made this video was that, the pretty American girl in the video, Jessica Davis, had been a rhythmic gymnast and 1996 Olympian. When Martin and I invited her to join our project, we only knew that she's a foreign student in the university to study Chinese.
Ok, I have to stop my 'verbal pollution' right now. Please enjoy the video, folks.
For more than one· year at Economic Observer, a weekly business newspaper whose goal is to be the Financial Times in mainland China, I've met plenty of PR agencies. For some of them, I'm a good private friend, and we often hang out for dinner together and share some ideas about the industries or our daily lives. For others, Steven Lin has become a footy name printed on an rectangular, which has been probably thrown into a recycle box and vanished.
How to judge them? And what kind of relationship should be proper between journalists and the PR agencies? My friends from the western media often told me that they are definitely standing on the opposite sides. Journalists' mission is to discover the truth behind the magnificent scenes glossed by the companies, while the PR agencies will protect you from doing such kind of things in full sail. All of the words from the agencies' mouths are diplomatic and they are only some slippery people who are blindly loyal to their employers. Is it true?
Company A is among the biggest search engines over the world and I‘ve contacted with two PR people who work for it. When I met Ms. B for the first time, she was a business reporter from a leading weekly magazine in China. After less than one year, she joined a PR agent, one of whose clients is Company A. Every time I criticised the company on my blog, she counldn't stop arguing with me and often ask me to publish "something good for them".
On the contrary, Ms. C is the PR specialist of the company and always told me to write "anything objective no matter it's positive or negative" if I feel comfortable. She helped me to get the full permission in their office building for some inside stories, but promised not to modify my articles unless there are some inexact data.
Of course you have gotten aware of my attitutes to each of them, and my answer to the "relationship" quesion. Most PR people i've met in Beijing are unprofessional - they had done tons of things out of their duties, appended too much personal points to their daily jobs and annoyed the journalists. For any PR agency, being tactful or diplomatic is
one thing, making lies or trying to curb media is another.
It has been proved that any actions to provoke the media will cause stronger conterforce. Remember the PR agencies of EMI China who wanted to buy media? The wave of critism on The Flower Band is a good example of what would be brought out by some inconsiderate PR strategies.
What would you suppose to see when opening an envelope with a familiar trademark on the front? A well-printed promoting paperback for the Spring Festival shopping season? Maybe. A fancy invitation to the company's cocktail party? Possibly. But for most Chinese reporters, no matter on whose press conference they got a commercial envelope, it always equals to a Hongbao (Red Package in Mandarine), the most important source of their afterhours income.
How much money has been enclosed by the PR persons? No legible standards. But the amount depends on the scale of the company who hold the press conference, essentiality of the product or project which will be released, status of the speechmaker who attends the conference, and sometimes, type of the media which the reporter is serving for - as you know, a Hollywood Paparazzi, a Silicon Valley Reporter and a Wall Street Journalist are always treated as three totally different careers.
Based on these inexplicable factors, the amount of money in Red Packages ranges from 200 to 500 yuan (USD 25.00 - 62.50), and the average is 300 yuan. It seems not a big deal. But if a reporter keeps the pace of attending more than 20 press conferences per month, the situation will be dramaticly changed. The ordinary monthly salary for a newcome reporter in Beijing is no more than 3000 yuan, but a familiar face on the press conference would earn from the companies 2 to 3 times much as they get paid by the media.
The most interesting story about Red Packages I've heard is about an intern reporter from a national daily newspaper who threw two envelopes she received on a press conference directly to a trash can, unaware of what else could have been put into them besides the boring company backgrounds. When she discovered the truth soon after coming back to office and chitchated with her colleagues, she rushed back for the gold immediatly.
Nowadays, Red-Package reports almost fills every newspaper in mainland China. I don't know how the PR agency build relationships with reporters in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the western countries. But in The Hospital, a Taiwan TV series aired in the autumn 2006, the surgeon played by Leon Dai asked his assistant to "prepare some little gifts for our reporter friends".
Maybe it's the best way to push reporters to copy and paste the PR releases on the newspapers, however, for the reporters who work for the newspapers that don't allow any kind of news release or so-called "soft advertisement" being published, receiving a Red Package would turn out to be a beginning of nightmares. The phone calls, emails, instant messages and instand messages from PR persons to remind you of the article will badly mess your work and daily life.
In the first days of every Chinese lunar year, aged people always hand Red Packages to their grandsons and granddaughters and make some wishes for them like "learn harder and get better grade for the future". When the reporters receive Red Packages from the PR persons, they would probably see a sentence "work harder and make more money for the company" on the meaningful smiling faces.
What did you think you would never ever do... but did?
Submitted by Murky.
Failed an exam.
It was the final-term exam of Marxism Political Economics: Socialism Part in which I got the lowest grade of all my classmates: 56/100. I don't like anything about Carl Marx or the so-called Socialism, both of which are taught in class only mainly in some Socialism countries like China or North Korea as brainwashing tools. What's more, the only thing I could do when facing a textbook about Marxism or Socialism was sleeping. Who needs this kind of bullshit?
However, I have to admit that I was absolutely fucked up when the worst news I've ever heard of was released. Indeed, I had not failed any exams and always got A or B at least in the first 19 years of my life. It was the Mid-Autumn Festival 2003, I could not stop shaking for the whole day even though the seniors told me it was nothing to care, nothing to care, nothing, take it easy man... again and again.
Ok, I found 50 ways to fail an exam. It's great sharing the tips with you guys. Enjoy~.
Do you remember your first flight? Where did you go? Why?
Submitted by Laurel.
In the days all my families are waiting for the exam's result, my mom asked me if I wanted a travel. "A travel to some big and famous cities for the historic sites! We could got a brilliant discount, maybe 50% or more, for the air tickets in summer vacation." She said. In that days, each of the monthly salaries for my mom and dad was only a little more than 1,000 yuan, which could not pay for one air ticket without discount. However, my mom insisted on the plan. "Go to see the outside world, my son." my dad patted my head and said.
Different from the westen families, trip was not a necessary part for most Chinese ones. Maybe, the most important reason was the people cannot afford it. If a travel would cost lots of money for which you should work so hard for half a year and keep saving money without consuming for any big things, who could even think about it? For many Chinese families, this situation never changed. But the idea of getting their son "to see the outside world" made my parents withdraw the money out of the bank and buy the tickets for my mom and me.
Finally, my grade for the exam was the best in the primary school of a small city, and mom was very proud of me and took me to the airport by bus so happily that I cannot forget for the whole life. Our plane to Jinan, the first stop of the travel, delayed, and I telephoned my dad and described the boring scene for him.
I still remember every moment of my first flight - the mood of excite, the shaking plane, the "fasten seat belt" instruction, and the kind expression in my mom's eyes. Short before landing, it's totally dark outside and I cannot see anything. I felt a little disappointed, because I had thought there would be plenty of beautiful lights on the ground. But that kind of thinking disappeared at once, and the eagerness of taking a glance of the big cities came back again...
From then on, my mom and I haven't travelled together for long, because I'm "too busy" nowadays. This stupid reason has came out of my mouth time and time again, and I discovered one day that we are all so busy that we cannot remember the first flight with mom or dad or both of them, which came true when we were their little lovely kids.
