Popular: The posts that got people talking, ranked by your recommendations and comments.
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62 year old Guangzhou man is New York City's Sad Panda
Since around March this year, a sad-looking panda has been spotted roaming the streets of New York City — on the subway, in Times Square, at various parks and around Wall Street's bull statue. Over the next few months, the Sad Panda has intrigued and fascinated New Yorkers — his short disappearance on Wall Street led a few concerned individuals to put up a missing notice, and his great makeover as Spongebob Squarepants did not go unnoticed. Turns out this Sad Panda is a 62 year old man from Guangzhou, Chen Jialing, who has now lived in the United States for many years.
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Dear Slate, yes there are chocolate bars in China
Daniel Gross of Slate has been over here reporting on the controversial Three Gorges Dam project. And while we can't say anything too bad about his coverage of that - which, while it reads more like a disgruntled travel piece than actual hardhitting journalism, is generally close enough to what little facts we know about the dam that it makes it impossible for us to nitpick - we were surprised by one of his...
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Thanksgiving turkey conundrum? The solution: Taobao
"I think we're going to need to have chicken for Thanksgiving this year," our roommate told us, faces twisted in dismay. A Thanksgiving traditionalist, she had been adamant about cooking the meal at home for friends rather than head out to any of the many restaurant/take away options other people have outlined. "What? Why?" "Turkey's just too expensive! Everywhere I look - Cityshop, Carrefour, home delivery services - it's something like 400RMB for a...
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China: Nine nations in one?
Anyone who’s been trawling through the China-related web this week will surely have stumbled across the ‘Nine Nations of China’ map that surfaced on Atlantic Monthly. Patrick Chovanec, from Tsinghua University, posted his map amidst the inescapable excitement of Obama’s visit to China, reminding the US President that China is "a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, and historical character."
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Barbie Megastore proves to be tough sell
Despite getting a ton of press when it first opened back in March, it looks like the Barbie Megastore on Huai Hai Road just hasn't been as popular as Mattel had hoped. The six-floor retailing monolith has been unable to make any of its "astronomical" sales targets. According to Bloomberg, the store replaced its general manager, Laura Lai, with Mattel "retail specialist" Dann Murphy earlier this month, before revising its sales targets for the...
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"Haibao is coming"
A Shanghai-based English copywriter has discovered some hilarious Chinglish slogans, including a new one for Haibao that explains the Shanghai Expo mascot's consistently happy visage. Since we've previously determined that Haibao is a boy mascot, all we can think of say to his slogan is... "Really? So soon?"...
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Gallery
Nuclear fallout Beijing: Mao's underground city
What's lurking underneath Tiananmen Square? It ain't just rats. In 1969, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Mao commissioned the construction of an underground city, built right under Beijing. Fearing an imminent nuclear attack from the U.S.S.R, Dixia Cheng (地下城 the underground city) was meant to be a safeguard, designed to house 40% of the city's 7.5 million in case of catastrophe. It was meant to have apartments, stores, and even a skating rink:...
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Lot o' Hotpot: Three Travellers
Hotpot season is upon us, and the first in our series of hotpot reviews this upcoming winter is Three Travellers [sic] (三人行骨头王火锅), a chain that recently opened its newest baby smack dab in the middle of the fantastic restaurant corner that is Fumin/Julu Lu. Unlike other Sichuan style hotpots, the specialty here isn’t of the numbing ma la variety. People flock here for the rich pork bone stock, a thick and fragrant broth that...
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Midweek Music Preview: Free tickets to Au Revoir Simone, Gaslamp Killer
Shanghaiist lists all the live music performances you might want to check out from now to Sunday this week. For fun things that aren't live music, take a peek at our Pencil This In (out every Monday!) You know what's even better than the live music acts gracing our city this week? The ability to get into them for FREE. That's right, this week, we're holding TWO mini-ticket giveaway contests - one for Brooklyn...
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Electrolist: Berlin 8-bit retroblaster tonight
Electrolist, by Shanghai Ultra of the VOID crew, gives the lowdown on the Shanghai electronic music scene each week, with picks, tips, news, and other rumors. Thanks to the Phreaktion Crew, Roni Size and his sidekick Dynamite MC packed a white-hot Shelter last weekend. Electrolist couldn't make it due to a football-related incident, so we asked the first person we could find who did. City raver Orlando Crowcroft, from the UK Channel Island of...
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Interview: Rich Medina funks up the Shelter
Rich Medina, a veteran of the New York music scene, is tearing up the Shelter on Friday night - a party you definitely don't want to miss. Who is he? Besides being the resident DJ at New York's super-hip APT club on Wednesday night, he also holds it down with Q-tip, of a Tribe Called Quest, at Santo's Party House. This past summer he and Bobbito Garcia hosted "Happy Feet" at New York's Le...
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Follow Team Shanghaiist on Twitter
If there's one thing that we at Shanghaiist would like to thank the Net Nanny for, it's that she's totally reunited Chinese microbloggers with the one big happy family that is Twitter again. You see, previously, everyone was distributed across a plethora of local microblogging services, but now with the demise of the two kingpins of the Chinese twitter clone world, Fanfou and Jiwai, everyone's just decided to collectively show the GFW their middle finger by signing up for a VPN and rejoining the conversation on Twitter.
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Cinematheque: Mulan is finally Chinese again! (and other film news)
Mulan, the old Chinese tale that was made into a Disney movie in 1998, is finally finding its way back home to its original country. Under the direction of Jingle Ma and with Zhao Wei in the leading role, the movie about the female warrior goes up on cinemas starting Friday. Who can resist another epic costume drama from China?! We guess it´s about time Chinese film makers took back their legendary woman-warrior Hua...
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Protest in Guangzhou: Why would you burn garbage?
As a testament to the increasingly daring nature of Chinese citizens, people have come out in mass to voice their vehement dislike of a recent government policy. Considering China's harsh treatment of large scale public protests and the potential ramifications participating could have on individuals, we figure only the most egregious of political moves could bring together so many people in harmonious dissent. So what happened? Guangzhou's government announced yesterday that the city was...
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Gallery
Barbie Spa: For the cosmopolitan plastic beauty in you
The overwhelming pinkness aside, we're going to throw this thought out there: Shanghai's ginormous Barbie store is actually pretty cool. After a few hours spent meandering through doll city (though our experience was not as intense as CNNGo's self-challenge) we decided that the awesome Barbie Spa is our favorite feature of the place. Yes, that's right - we are encouraging you to head on over to 550 Huai Hai Road to get beautified, Barbie-style. But...
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Obama in China: Long gone, and still headlinin'
It's been a week since Obama first arrived in our great city, and we've done so much coverage on his short trip to the PRC that we're thinking we should start marking our time in relation to the president's visit: you know, Before Obama and After Obama. In week one A.O., we've watched the press capitulate and rage some more for and against the quickly formed recaps and opinion pieces of last week. It's...
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How AIDS in China is spreading
The World Health Organization and the Joint United Nations HIV/AIDS campaign, or UNAIDS for short (good acronym, right?), was formally released yesterday for the first time in China. Though the report only shows cases reported by medical facilities and could thus be far higher, the dissemination is a major step in understanding and fighting AIDS in the country. First, the facts from Shanghai Daily: By October 31, China had reported 319,877 cases of HIV/AIDS,...
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Shanghaiist Scrabble: We have a winner!
Last night's Shanghaiist Scrabble was full of warmhearted, frenetic spelling: players scrambled to push their way to the board to capture coveted double letter and triple word scores as others sat with old friends and new Scrabblemates, drinking and trying to think of words that could possibly combine two F's and a Q. In the end, Liz managed to blow away the competition with "PSEUDONYM," catching the elusive and coveted Quadruple Word Score, a...
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Obama in China: News Roundup
Well, President Obama's first trip to China is now officially over. A lot of things happened, a lot of people talked about it, but nothing too groundbreaking occurred. Obama seemed to have a good trip: he visited famous Chinese landmarks, met with his brother, even talked a bit of politics along the way. But a lot of us were ultimately left with a feeling something like disappointment: for various reasons, the mythic qualities of...
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Man-made swine-bird flu supervirus: What's French for "apocalypse"?
Since up until now, we've only seen the third case of serious swine flu emerged in Shanghai, you may well be wondering, “how bad could all this hullabaloo get anyway?" Pretty bad. Do you remember Avian Flu? The one that had a high mortality rate but was difficult to contract? What would you say about the creation of a supervirus that was as contagious as the swine flu and as deadly as the avian...
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Nanfang Daily: (Foreign) girls gone wild!
Oh god: we're not really sure how this is newsworthy, but apparently Nanfang Daily decided that a bunch of pictures of drunken foreign girls awkwardly passed out was good enough to at least make into a photo gallery. The pictures were taken from popular BBS site Huanqiu: we couldn't find the original post, though we did find pictures of another netizen getting a duck drunk, which are funny, and somehow more disturbing. Nanfang Daily...
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'Stateless in Shanghai': Nov. 21 and 22
Stateless in Shanghai Cover Shanghai-born Dr. Liliane Willens will be speaking twice this weekend about her newly published book, Stateless in Shanghai at several venues around the city. But first, a word of explanation about what "stateless in Shanghai" really means: In the first half of the twentieth century, the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai contained the world's largest foreign population. They were, rather ironically, "stateless" persons: persons without citizenship in any country. Though most...
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Philanthropist: Rockin' with Roots & Shoots
In Shanghaiist's Philanthropist feature, we highlight individuals and groups doing interesting things to make the world a little bit of a better place. This week we talk to one of the organizers of the third annual Rock for Roots & Shoots concert. Rock for Roots & Shoots is a charity concert benefitting the Million Tree Project.Where: Yuyintang, 1731 Yanan Xi Lu, near Kaixuan Lu. 延安西路1731号(凯旋路) 中山公园小白楼 When: Saturday, November 21, 6PM to late Cover:...
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Interview: Kerry Ann Lee, culture shock = inspiration
Meet Kerry Ann Lee, Kiwi cultural philosopher and rising artist, who confuses her neighbors with her I-like-Rockabilly style and inability to speak Mandarin Chinese (despite a Chinese ethnic heritage). She's here in Shanghai for three months as part of the Wellington Asia Residency Exchange (WARE), an initiative developed by Asia New Zealand Foundation and Wellington City Council New Zealand, after solo shows in Dunedin and New York. She just unveiled two new pieces at...
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Garbage burning protests: The online life of dissent
Yesterday's protest against a plan to build a garbage burning plant in the city of Panyu has sparked a lot of interest all over the internet. A fair amount of people showed up, and it seems like Sina has given a pretty optimistic writeup of the town hall event that sparked the protest. Mostly, though, this whole affair has piqued our interest in how the internet has integrated itself into the protests. First and...
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Coming soon to a police checkpoint near you
Driving home late at night can be a scary experience: as drunk driving is on the rise, we find ourselves wondering: are those erratic cars weaving through traffic all drunk, or just reckless drivers? But fear not: Shanghai Daily informs us of a new invention in the works at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University that will help Shanghai's crackdown on drunk driving. The invention is a little cap that can read a driver's brain waves,...
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China's High School Musical actually College Freshman Musical
Thanks in part to the immense popularity High School Musical enjoyed whilst it was on the stage in Shanghai, Disney is now working with Shanghai Media Group and Huayi Bro.s on a Chinese-version of the made-for-TV movie - and it's based in our city! But those looking for a direct translation of the show will be pretty disappointed - it's being vastly adjusted to fit Chinese culture and sensibilities: First of all, the Shanghai...
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Snowy morning in Shanghai, or so they say
Shanghai Daily tells us that earlier this morning, snow sprinkled Shanghai for the first time this winter... just days later than they thought it would. We must've missed it, since by the time we woke up and got out in the street, there was nothing for us but damp sidewalks and dreary clouds. Alas - if anyone took pictures, we'd love to see 'em. But with Shanghai's first snow comes news that the cold front...
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Extra! Extra! Screwing over Guinea, climate change collaborations and poor ol' Microsoft
You could just call it good business, or you could call it a complete disregard for humanity - China's $7 billion resource deal with the African nation of Guinea (currently under a regime without legitimacy) has basically screwed Guineans out of their lifeline out of poverty. [The Independent]Want an explanation of what the Obama-Hu collaboration for clean energy and climate change really means? So do we. So here's one. [Green Leap Forward]Want to see...
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Weekendist: Wig party, pub crawl, art openings and more!
Yet another jam-packed weekend hits Shanghai. In case you're looking for something to do that's not related to all the live music choices available this week, we present you with some sweet alternatives. Ranging from a wig party, to a pub crawl, to yet another new art exhibit, we're sure you'll find something to keep yourself occupied. Friday: Wig out at Dada, boogie nights at Bar Rouge Find the craziest wig you can (Taobao...
