Results tagged “chinesehistory”

Clocking in at only 99 pages, Shanghai: High Lights Low Lights Tael Lights is an excellent appetizer for those of us who generally dine on heavier reading fare. The authors, Maurine Karns and Pat Patterson, make their purpose known early in the book: in the preface, titled “an explanation but not an apology,” Karns and Patterson state that they have written Tael Lights “with the hope of enjoying ourselves, of making a little money, and of not committing ourselves to anything for which we might be sorry” (xx). They proceed to describe, with delightful if decidedly un-PC irreverence, the Shanghai they saw before them when writing the book in 1936.

So we get that Google's really keen to gobble a little more market share from its rivals in China, and one of the most ingenious ways they've figured to do so is their free mp3 download service. We applaud that. What we don't applaud is their ads promoting the service, which seems to have taken the DIY ethic of viral videos to mean "crappy flash creations evoking the earlier parts of this millennium." Add that to Chinese history tales and you get G.cn's newest ad rush:

One of the movies we're most excited about seeing is Building 173, a docudrama about one Shanghainese building and the people who lived in it. It'll be airing twice on Saturday, June 20 - once at 6.30pm and a second one at 9pm (with a discussion afterward).

The Chinese government announced that they are going to be making some changes to the simplified character system （简体字） currently used throughout mainland China. According to the Shanghai Daily, the short list of revised characters is already completed and will be released sometime in the near future.

Here's an interesting mash up between a Cultural Revolution-era Long March opera and "Ninja" by Jay Chou, created - if the video's to be believed - by Lee Tang (李唐) from Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art two years back. Is the song choice supposed to be a little ironic, considering one of the parties the Long March ended just around the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese War?