china

Xinhua and a Zhejiang province news website report on the spread of "Red Heart China" on IM and e-mail platforms.

The Zhejiang News Center link, auto-translated here, says the word is spreading via QQ, a top instant message platform in China.

Hexun.com carries step-by-step instructions in how to inscribe your MSN account with slogans declaring "I love the Olympics" and encouraging them to go on strongly.

This is all part of an extensive reaction to foreign press coverage on the recent events in Tibet. Other websites, including anti-cnn.com, have emerged to point out examples … Read more

What's causing the global rise in food prices? Everything.

Growing demand for food in emerging nations, wheat crop failures, currency fluctuation, speculation in the commodities market, hastily conceived government policies, and the growing demand for biofuels have all--among other factors--converged to drive up the price of food, experts say.

"Those who say it's all the fault of biofuels are wrong and those that say that none of the fault belongs to biofuels are wrong," said Walter Falcon, a professor emeritus of international agricultural policy at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for Environmental Sciences … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Jan Chipchase is a cell phone modification guru. A researcher at Nokia Design in Tokyo, he's seen cell phones modified to hold up to 16 SIM cards and plenty more in his role at the company.

Chipchase is a member of a team at Finnish cell phone giant Nokia that's trying to lower the cost of phones for emerging markets, an effort that's part market development and part recycling. The group of 15 has scanned bazaars and street shops in places as diverse as Ghana, Brazil, Iran, India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, China, and Mongolia to learn … Read more

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's foundation received an undisclosed sum in exchange for his keynote address at an event held by Alibaba, the Chinese internet company that controls China Yahoo* and has been accused of aiding China's crackdown in Tibet.

Some activists are trying to tie this money to Sen. Hillary Clinton, saying it conflicts with her statements on China. In addition to claiming she "stood up to" China's government in a speech while Bill was president, she has said President George W. Bush should not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic … Read more

Google is giving itself about five years to unseat Baidu.com's dominance for Internet search in China, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday night.

"We would like to aspire to be a market leader in five years," Kai-Fu Lee, president of the Google's Greater China operation, told the Journal. Google also is examining possible investments in social networking and mobile Internet services, he said.

Chinese authorities in January announced they would ban ultrathin plastic bags, and make customers pay for reusable canvas grocery bags, in an effort to reduce waste.

A Beijing Review article quotes a Hangzhou supermarket manager on the old days, when shopping didn't produce billions of bags worth of waste that will biodegrade only after 200 years, if at all.

"When I was a child, my mother always took me to the vegetable market with a bamboo basket. She put a bowl in the basket for holding bean curd. When we bought sugar powder or salt, the sellers would … Read more

The inventor of the increasingly ubiquitous Pleco Chinese-English dictionary software for Palm and Windows Mobile devices said the company is "very seriously considering developing" an iPhone version.

In an interview in April's China International Business (not yet online), Michael Love tells of developing the 6-year-old product and how it's getting popular enough that many foreigners in China are buying PDAs or PDA phones just to use Pleco.

I, for one, would not have bought my Windows Mobile-running HTC Touch if not for this program, and untold dozens of my Beijing friends and acquaintances are carrying around … Read more

From my connection in Beijing, Blogspot has again gone offline. The transmission stops on a Chinese ISP server.

I was able to get through using proxies. Anyone else, or is this just me? Blogspot had reemerged two weeks ago after years being blocked almost continuously.

Does posting censorship workarounds help the censors? That's the question I've been mulling for the last few days. I asked for your comments, and the verdict is in: Almost no one thinks we should keep these tricks to ourselves. I agree.

I started grappling with this question after I posted a now-defunct workaround for Mainlanders to access the still-blocked Chinese language Wikipedia. After a commenter posted the link on Sinobyte, I featured the link in the post. Then the commenter, Ted Chien, wrote me concerned that having the workaround posted would lead to the authorities blocking it. I … Read more