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December 2006 - Posts

Three worth a read

Posted Friday, December 22, 2006 11:54 AM by will
Two blog posts and a newspaper article that I read today and felt like passing on: Down with your bourgeois, western holidays! I was going to blog this myself, but the always readable Granite Studio beat me to it . I can't add much to what Jeremiah has Read More...
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Stranger in a strange land

Posted Friday, December 22, 2006 11:27 AM by will
After ten brutal weeks that climaxed in what were possibly the three most gruelling weeks of my professional life, I am off on a well deserved vacation. Tomorrow afternoon Mrs. Imagethief and I will cram ourselves into the United nonstop for San Francisco Read More...
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All is in chaos...

Posted Friday, December 22, 2006 11:16 AM by will
Here's a little something I wrote for the December issue of China Economic Review , based on my supposition that sooner or later the Chinese government will really think twice about the involvement of foreigners in some aspects of the Chinese Internet Read More...
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Confetti

Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006 8:39 AM by will
When you do a lot of Chinese press events you get used to a certain amount of formula. The corsages for spokespeople, because otherwise the cameras might not know who to focus on. The incredibly literal backdrop inscription translated into ungrammatical Read More...
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Hog cracklin'

Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006 8:34 AM by will
This kind of thing never used to happen in my neighborhood in San Francisco: Twenty pigs burned to death in car crash in Beijing (Xinhua) Updated: 2006-12-20 18:44 BEIJING -- Twenty living pigs were burned to death in a fire caused by a car crash in Beijing. Read More...
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eBay eJects from China

Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006 7:34 AM by will
Chalk up another ignominious retreat for an American Internet company that once nursed grand China dreams. The conventional wisdom in the tech salons of Beijing (and, as I must now concede, Shanghai) has for some time been that eBay's days in China were Read More...
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Holy shit, Batman!

Posted Monday, December 18, 2006 6:32 AM by will
Imagethief has been pretty scarce recently. How scarce? So scarce that when he sits around the house, he sits around the house. (It's an inside joke. Don't worry about it.) Regular readers will note that I've been a little threadbare on the posts the Read More...
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Monday PR blog: Chinese consumers zap Apple over battery recall

Posted Monday, December 18, 2006 6:25 AM by will
As the owner of a Powerbook I recently went through Apple's battery recall. One of my two batteries was affected. I filled out the online form and within a week a new battery was delivered with a postage-paid return envelope for the old one. Crisp, clean Read More...
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An American spin doctor in Shanghai

Posted Sunday, December 10, 2006 6:37 AM by will
Imagethief will shortly start a three-month cross-assignment at his company's Shanghai office. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it'll be fun to spend an extended period of time in Shanghai and get to know the city a little bit better. Read More...
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CNET 48: TD-SCDMA MIA so ITU DOA

Posted Saturday, December 09, 2006 5:39 AM by will
TD-SCDMA MIA so ITU DOA December 9, 2006 I spent most of last week in Hong Kong at the immense ITU Telecom World expo and conference. ITU --the International Telecommunications Union -- is the global standards-setting body for the telecommunications industry, Read More...
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CNET 47: Does EVD mean the end of movie piracy in China?

Posted Thursday, December 07, 2006 7:13 AM by will
Does EVD mean the end of movie piracy in China? December 7, 2006 If you think Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are the only two high-definition video disc formats out there, you've missed a big part of the story. The missing chunk is EVD, or "Extended Versatile Disc", Read More...
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Who says Anhui has nothing to offer?

Posted Thursday, December 07, 2006 12:05 AM by will
With talent like this it's amazing the province has stayed as poor as it is. Also, this snake has gone where no living creature should ever have to go, bacteria excepted. Read More...
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Imagethief in Hongkers next few days

Posted Saturday, December 02, 2006 10:23 PM by will
Imagethief will be in Hong Kong for the next few days, at the ITU Telecom World conference, where he will be flapping his arms wildly like some kind of deranged guineau fowl in an attempt to win press attention for one of his clients. If any readers will Read More...
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Black helicopters above Beijing?

Posted Saturday, December 02, 2006 4:44 AM by will
Imagethief has been working until late in the evening quite a bit recently (hence the light posting). This has to many after-hours taxi rides that have offered an opportunity to study Beijing's sometimes hallucinatory nighttime landscape. On these rides, Read More...
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Saturday PR blog: Olympics mean a softer touch for foreign correspondents, maybe

Posted Saturday, December 02, 2006 2:53 AM by will
Ed Cody of the Washington Post's Beijing bureau has written an interesting story on a new decree from the Chinese government that will grant foreign correspondents in China significantly more freedom in the months before and after the games. The article Read More...
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Fly the feces-free skies of China Southern

Posted Friday, December 01, 2006 1:56 AM by will
Few things have provided more grist for Imagethief's gripemill than Chinese airlines. A simple search of this website for various permutations of China+Airline+Travel will make that abundantly clear. In part this hostility is unfair. Chinese airlines Read More...
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