PandaPassport.com – China Blog

I don’t talk much about financial news, because – simply put – I just don’t know that shit that well. But here are recent stories that I ran across which will be of interest to anyone investing in Chinese stock.

Warren Buffett warns that Chinese Stock Market is too hot
I’ve noticed a lot of my Chinese friends are turning their attention to buying stock. Warren Buffett reminds us: “We never buy stocks when we see prices soaring,” Mr Buffett said. “We buy stocks because we’re confident of the company’s growth. People should be cautious when they see prices rising.”

Sell China before the Games
And then there’s this dude from Forbes: “I’d recommend that no investor put another dime into high-flying China-based mutual funds, ADRs or ETFs at this time. And if you were smart or lucky enough to invest in China before, you should promptly lock in at least half of your hefty gains.”

And if those two weren’t enough for ya, Techcrunch has a piece simply entitled The China Bubble.

A couple of posts from my other blog over at CNet asia:

Blackberry: It’s the New Opium!
It’s official, Blackberry’s coming to China. I think it’ll be big. Check out this article to see why. Arguably my favorite post-title ever!

Look out Harry Potter: China Develops Invisibility Cloak
File under B for Bizarre. This turbo-charged rain-jacket is damn cool if it turns out to be the real thing. Not sure how far stealth technology has advanced in China, but if this video is the real deal – well, that’s way cool.

Censored: The Harmony Papers
A pdf report released from Reporters without Borders gives an inside look at internet censorship on China. Ironically, but not unexpectically, the report has cannot be viewed in China. Though I did provide an alternate means of downloading it.

So youtube is banned.

There are gonna be a ton of expats in China looking for alternative ways to waste their time. Fortunately, I consider myself somewhat of an expert in wasting time, and I do have some great recommendations. 5 in total.

Number 1: DailyShow.com

Jon Stewart is great. Until just recently, there was no real decent place to watch him online. Or Stephen Colbert. There’s an ongoing lawsuit between Viacomm and Youtube, due to their videos ending up on where they shouldn’t have. Until now, with the exception of Comedy Central’s site and iFilm.com, there was no place to check them online. Until now. Every Daily Show ever is now archived for your viewing pleasure. DailyShow.com. Gotta love it.

Number 2: 6.cn, Foreign TV shows

If you click on playlist, like so:

And then scroll down to the Overseas Television section, like so:

This will instantly take you to TV heaven. Browse the newest or the hottest laowai TV, depending on the mood you’re in.

Number 3: Real books are for suckers. Try Audio books

Go buy yourself an iPod or some Chinese iPod knockoff, and soak up some edumacation via these audiobook sites – here, here, or here.

Number 4: You prefer radio, do you?

Try iHeard.com, musicovery.com, or Social.fm. Pandora’s a no go for outside the US these days, and you probably know last.fm already.

Number 5: My Silly Tumblr Media Site

You could always try my accumulated tv links, which is good fun as well. When I find stuff, I’ll click a button on my browser and it goes on automatically. I’ll add a few a week. If you’re interested, sign yo’ ass up via RSS.
Update: After much thought, I’ve decided to take this down.

Hope you find at least one of those links useful.

If you know any other neato links, post them in the comments.

Well, on a tip from Chris and Alex, it looks as though youtube might have just been “harmonized.”

I get a “page not found” when trying to access youtube.com right now, and a quick ping of the site through command prompt goes unanswered. Request timed out. 100% packets lost. Sad…

On the other hand, Chinese youtube clones like youku.com, 6rooms, and tudou.com are still working perfectly. You can see below, a ping of youku.com is successful.

Just to show how f*cked up the Chinese net-nanny is, I pinged pornotube.com for shits and giggles, and it works like a charm. Apparently some of the powers that be are not quite ready to part with that one.

Hopefully this doesn’t last long. But given the net nanny’s previous exploits, who knows what we can expect…
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Recently featured on Gizmodo, here’s an interesting keyboard which will recognized hand-written Chinese characters.

Of course, most people would never bother with such as thing when Chinese input editors are so easy to use these days.

But who knows? Maybe it might be of interest to some of you readers out there who are studying chinese as a second language.
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Before any Chinese people get angry at me for posting this, let me first tell you that it came from Vincent Chow’s website. Now in order to determine whether he has any right to post such a cartoon, please go to his about page, and wrestle with that dilemma for yourself.

I just made the neato slideshow.

Get the Code:
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" src="http://w205.photobucket.com/pbwidget.swf?pbwurl=http://w205.photobucket.com/albums/bb140/pandapassport/bfe0d74c.pbw" height="360" width="480"></embed>

If you think it’s funny, digg Vincent’s original post.

Any thoughts?

I’m not going to say too much about this one. Only that I hate the Chinese finger-wag gesture, and I’m not too fond of foreign Chinese language students who adopt it when trying to add a little Chinese cultural flair to their fluency.

One of the reasons that I’m not fond of the finger wag, is that all too often it’s a marker of transition — it can be the first physical action that turns a verbal altercation into an all-out fist fight. Or slap-fight, as in this case. Pay attention to the first ten seconds of the video:

What’s that? You got a finger do you?!
Well, how do you like this! I’m gonna slap that finger!
Oh, you’re gonna kick me now, are ya?
F*ck your mother!

So to all you Chinese language students out there, trying to make every effort to appear fluent, I implore all of you to lay off the finger wagging.

It doesn’t do anybody any good.

P.S. Hands up if you’ve ever seen a man-vs-woman altercation like this before in China. Anybody?