PandaPassport.com – China Blog

I try to keep things on a China theme on here. But every so often something comes along that is so ridiculous, I just gotta post it.

Such is the case with this Lego-fied version of the A-Team intro.

So, so excellent.
Other videos:
A-Team LOTR style
Lost A Team
Gears of War A Team

Having come across “7 Super-Sized (And Somewhat Insane) Soviet Projects” on Digg the other day, I started to wondering about all the Chinese Architectural monstrosities there are out there these days. Great Wall excluded of course…

Are these, like the Soviet projects, a public flexing o’ the muscles aimed at showing off to the West? Who knows…
But damned if they ain’t wacky, thas fo’ sure!

1. Shanghai World Financial Center

a.k.a. “The Bottle Opener.” This one was definitely poorly conceived:

The architects, Kohn Pedersen fox, intended to reflect the Chinese cosmic model of ’square fearth and round heaven,’ with the tower’s square column intersected by two sweeping arcs, resulting in a slender crown punctuated by a large circle….The Shanghainesee, knowing that japanese money was behind the project, decided to see this figurative motif as two Japanese army swords holding a Japanese flag over Shanghai – a regrettable metaphor in light of 20th century history – and the construction was halted. The architect’s response to this public rage was, once again, figurative; the circle is now intersected by a bridge, and is transformed into a Chinese ‘moon gate.’” Source

Did I mention it looks like a bottle opener? Read the rest of this entry »

Chinese video sharing sites are great. They’re like youtube, only way faster and you can watch way longer clips.

Now one of the bonuses of these two features is that you can watch full length productions on there (often as high as 1 hour long videos), without having to wait for them to load as you sometimes might on youtube.

Of course, given that it is China the more “relaxed” approach to (Hollywood’s) intellectual property often results in many movies and TV shows being posted on there that many people would not agree with. Personally, I think we could do worse that expose a previously isolated country to our American culture through our pop media. And the citizen journalism that happens on there is a huge plus as well. But that’s another discussion…

Another reason why such movies and TV shows can fly under the radar is thanks to the stealth cloaking often referred to as Mandarin Chinese. Most people in America just can’t read the interface, and so box offices won’t lose any revenue as a result of these videos being online. (Of course it was a different story when TVlinks started embedding the Chinese videos on a site where English speaking viewers could find them!)

Anyway, to get to the point — if anyone was itching to check out these video sharing sites, but doesn’t read Chinese or doesn’t have Chinese software installed, here’s something you can try.

Here are the links to some of them, run through Google Translator: Read the rest of this entry »

The trailer for the animated movie Kung Fu Panda is now available on the net. This looks like one to keep an eye out for, as the voice-actor cast is pretty impressive — Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Lucy Liu, Angelina Jolie, and Jackie Chan.

In any case, a movie about animals doing martial arts should be a great recipe for success. Ninja Turtles didn’t do too bad right?

Aug 29 2009 Update: Unfortunately this workaround doesn’t fly anymore. But check out John Pasden’s post on Sinosplice for an even better one.

I don’t use Twitter too much. I run my blog feeds through it, and that’s about it. But I do see the use in being able to publish to the web via text message. It could come in handy in certain situations.

Sending SMS messages to Twitter from China is relatively expensive, at least by Chinese standards:

“you need to text up Britain — the only internationally-open number is prefixed +44, somewhere in the British isles. International SMS is 10 times the cost of standard SMS; the moment a text message leaves the mainland, you pay CNY 1, not CNY 0.10.” –David Feng

So while I don’t plan to use it that much, I just set up an unusual workaround so that I can send text messages from my cell phone in China, and they’ll be published on Twitter.

Here’s how it works.

1. Set up an account on Fanfou.com, which is a Chinese version of Twitter. Jiwai.de will likely work as well.
2. Take the RSS feed of your Fanfou page, and run it through Twitterfeed. Update: Your fanfou RSS feed should look something like this, http://api.fanfou.com/statuses/user_timeline/pandapassport.rss, where you’d replace “pandapassport” with your own username. Look for the orange RSS logo in the bottom right, and copy and paste the link.
   

Now when you send a text message to Fanfou, it will show on that page, but it will also be fed to your Twitter page as well. Unfortunately, your Fanfou username will be stuck on the front (so choosing a short name is best), and a tinyurl link to your Fanfou “tweet” will be appended to the end. The fastest that Twitterfeed will check for updates is every 30 mins, so it will require that time at the most before your tweet hits Twitter.

But in case you ever need to send a message like “Help! I’ve been arrested in an Olympic protest” (or something along those lines…) this will do the trick, I’m sure. Read the rest of this entry »

If Michael Jackson ever had sex with a Chinese migrant worker back in the mid ’80s – I’m not saying that he did, but stranger things have happened – then this guy is the result.

Watch as he performs in a public square and draws quite a crowd, much to the annoyance of the guards standing by. They approach him in an effort to get him to stop, but he’s just too slippery and dances away from them with relative ease:

Thoroughly excellent.

I was in a cab on my way to dinner yesterday, when I spotted a silver Nissan sporting, of all things, an Obama ‘08 bumper sticker! I suppose it must have been an American driving that car – which is unusual for expats here as most of ‘em are here short term – but I just thought it was way weird, and was very surprised and pleased to see it.

I suppose it wouldn’t have had to have been an American. People all over the globe will likely be rooting for Barack Obama to take the presidency in 2008. I know I am, and I’m Canadian. I watched Hilary Clinton on msnbc’s Meet the Press yesterday, and I found it really tedious to listen to her dodge questions as most politicians do.

Replies like “Yes, but I think the important thing to remember here is…”
Answer the damn question dammit.

Obama is a gifted speaker. And on top of that, I was pleased to see last week that he was busy making calls to opposition leaders in Kenya in an effort to help quell the craziness that’s going on over there. I’m also very encouraged that he’s willing to have dialogue with nations that the present administration have turned a cold shoulder to.

Contrary to what his opponents would like you to believe, Barack Obama seems to be more than just talk — and he’s showing that even now. Read the rest of this entry »