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March 2009 - Posts

Richard Spencer interview in Danwei

Posted Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:45 AM by will
Imagethief had a lot of time for Richard Spencer's blog when Spencer was the Daily Telegraph's man in Beijing. Richard was rather ahead of the blogging journalist wave. He has recently moved on to a new posting in Dubai (where I presume he is now covering Read More...
2 Comments

Pardon my executive jet

Posted Tuesday, March 24, 2009 8:04 AM by will
What do you do when your product becomes the very symbol of everything that's causing popular rage to boil in the United States? Ask the executive jet industry , via the New York Times : The [executive jet] industry had already had a slowdown last fall, Read More...
7 Comments

Indispensible guides to Chinese net lingo

Posted Friday, March 20, 2009 1:05 AM by will
Having written recently about the dreaded and now entirely overexposed grass mud horse, I thought I would point interested readers at two other useful sources of Chinese online slang and puns. One is chinaSMACK's glossary of Chinese Internet terms , a Read More...
4 Comments

The People's Daily as ritual rather than news

Posted Wednesday, March 18, 2009 7:25 AM by will
Pop by the blog of Peter Ford, the Christian Science Monitor's man in Beijing and read his post on the People's Daily's approach to covering the National People's Congress , which has apparently remained the same since time immemorial. Or at least since Read More...
12 Comments

Rui Chenggang and advocating for China

Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009 6:55 AM by will
There was an interesting profile of CCTV personality Rui Chenggang by journalist Dave Barboza in yesterday's New York Times . Or, at least as interesting as a 1,200 word profile can be. With all respect to Mr. Barboza, who has done some great stories, Read More...
15 Comments

Origins of the old "8 percent" China economy chestnut

Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009 6:30 AM by will
Jim McGregor, founder of JLM Pacific Epoch, former head of Dow Jones in China, author of "One Billion Customers", and all-round China éminence grise , has written a post on the JLM blog that gets into the origins of the widely quoted "8 percent" figure. Read More...
5 Comments

Clay Shirky on the fate of newspapers

Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009 6:14 AM by will
An interesting read from author Clay Shirky. The first couple of paragraphs: Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the Read More...
0 Comments

Plugging my AmCham forum's social network marketing event next week

Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 4:41 AM by will
Imagethief sits on AmCham's Marketing, Advertising and PR (MAP) Forum committee. Next week my forum is hosting an event on social network marketing in China. I will not be speaking on the panel. In fact, the PR industry will be represented by someone Read More...
11 Comments
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What the "grass mud horse" means and doesn't mean

Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 12:40 AM by will
Warning : This post contains vulgarity in an academic context. Those with weak constitutions are advised to stop reading and visit this wholesome site instead. The New York Times has an interesting story about Chinese Internet users putting a stick in Read More...
8 Comments

BBC: China's return to the land

Posted Friday, March 13, 2009 12:35 AM by will
The BBC's Quentin Sommerville has a long and interesting video segment on the return of Chinese migrant laborers to the land. The video is online , but the BBC doesn't support embedding. Quentin, perhaps you could have a word with them about that... Read More...
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Explaining my continuing absence

Posted Wednesday, March 11, 2009 3:21 AM by will
This has been something of a running theme the last few weeks, but I'm sure it hasn't escaped my reader's (that isn't a typo*) notice that Imagethief has been pretty quiet of late. All I can say is it's been a little thick on the work front, including Read More...
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The Z Files

Posted Sunday, March 08, 2009 7:02 AM by will
A good friend of mine who shall go nameless* once said of me, "He writes a good blog, but too much about his kid." Or words to that effect. So to solve that problem, and to make life easier for my parents, who are interested in Zach but don't give much Read More...
6 Comments
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Don't mention the "C" word!

Posted Monday, March 02, 2009 3:12 AM by will
I realize that the last two posts I have written both use the word "cadre" in the title. This must mean something. Probably that I'm not posting enough. In fact you have to go back to July, 2007 to find the last time I used the word "cadre" in a post Read More...
7 Comments

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a cadre...

Posted Sunday, March 01, 2009 6:08 AM by will
It's well worth your time to go and read the two articles that David Bandurski has written for the indispensible China Media Project on Yunnan deputy propaganda chief Wu Hao. In the first post , Bandurski gets under the hood of Wu's "citizens' investigation" Read More...
4 Comments