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Don't miss James Fallows' superb story in Atlantic Monthly on China's national communication woes. Fallows gets into all the things that China does to undermine its own attempts to improve its international image. It's a fascinating read for anyone interested China and communication:Such self-inflicted damage occurs routinely, without the pressure ...

Like on the top-forty radio show Imagethief used to listen to as a thirteen-year old, the hits keep coming in the Sanlu milk powder crisis. Over the past thirty-six hours the situation has evolved from a company-specific Sanlu crisis to a nationwide dairy-industry crisis reminiscent of the glory days of last summer's product quality crisis. Here ...

If you want to get people mad --I mean fired-up, torch-and-pitchfork enraged-- screw with their pets or their babies. That's what we've learned over the past year thanks to the unfortunate tendency of the plastic melamine to pop up in the strangest places, most recently in infant formula from Sanlu, a mighty Chinese dairy firm. You would think ...

Imagethief, being an arrogant son of a bitch and a bona-fide member of the Ivory Tower Elite, is seldom interested in what the common man has to say. Nothing gets me to change the channel faster than an ''iReport'' segment on CNN, or the BBC equivalent. Of course, most professional pundits are equally useless, so in a sense, my contempt is ...

Via the China Digital Times, this outstanding excerpt from the transcript of Wednesday's IOC/BOCOG press conference (the ninth in a wretched series, we are informed). I've excised some back and forth between the question and response: South China Morning Post: Mr. Wang and Giselle, we did get to know there were 77 applicants to the protest. ...

The latest incident report from the Foreign Correspondents Club of China is out. It doesn't make for pretty reading:BEIJING: OFFICERS ROUGH UP AP PHOTOGRAPHERS, SEIZE MEMORY CARDS August 20, 2008: Two Associated Press photographers attempting to cover an Olympics-timed protest were ...

This New York Times article is a few days old, but I didn't have time to get to it when it first came out. Apparently some of the press conferences got a little scratchy as journalists got frustrated with BOCOG's oblique responses to any question not focusing on China's immense medal haul, and the IOCs equally vapid responses. In this case, the ...

After you swallow a fair dose of the Chinapocalypse coverage that tends to ricochet through western media it can be nice to have a little antidote. John Pomfret, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post and a long-time China correspondent, has written an opinion piece that attempts to cut through some of the common, alarmist (from a ...

The downside of scanning something like thirty Google alerts a day is that you lose productivity and fill your head with random crap. The upside is that you sometimes notice strange juxtapositions of news. For example, the following two Reuters stories: One (filed in ''odd news'' I note) on the government's attempts to rein in vulgar advertising ...

Cliff Coonan has a story in showbiz trade Variety that examines the broadcasting problems I posted about last week. The article is something of an omnibus piece on current Olympic issues. Among other things, it gets into the organizers' efforts to develop and promote an official cheer. This part is worth highlighting: While Beijing is on the ...