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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 ...

Have a read of this post from the Wall Street Journal's China Journal blog on some of the communciation issues Coke is having around its attempted takeover of the Huiyuan juice company in China:More damaging may be the allegations that Coke is trying to silence critics of the deal in China, which were published in this Chinese language article ...

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 Boing Boing, Ethan Persoff's website of political and counterculture cartoons (and other interesting things) has an excellent gallery of 35 late '50s and early '60s Chinese political cartoons. Unfortunately the cartoons are not translated, but the images generally speak for themselves. If you're interested in Chinese propaganda art or Cold War ...

Black and White Cat compares an August 10th New York Times article on Beijing's preparation for the Olympics with a heavily ''improved'' version run in translation in the Beijing Evening News (with attribution). The Cat creatively shows the omissions and additions together: Visitors to the Olympics, however, can be forgiven for thinking are ...

Xinhua headlines from the last 36 hours, almost all of which came to me in one Google news alert:Swiss media praise Beijing Olympic Games World leaders, media praise Beijing OlympicsU.S. media praises ''truly exceptional'' Beijing Olympics  Iranian media hails Beijing Olympics as great success Foreign leaders hail successful Beijing ...

Take some time and read journalist Jonathan Ansfield's post on Newsweek's China blog recounting his participation in a meeting with the editors of the Global Times (环球时报). The Global Times is the fiery, flag-waving, tabloid companion to the Party's unreadably staid People's Daily. Ansfield discussed the dialogue with the editors, the Global Times' ...

Two or three weeks ago the New Yorker carried a good article by Evan Osnos on the phenomenon of China's ''angry youth'' (fenqing). Much of the article was a profile of one young man in particular. In truth, he sounds more passionate than angry. It's worth reading the whole thing, but there was one section I found particularly interesting:When ...

Amended: Sorry--this wasn't meant to be published. It was a placeholder and a few notes for a possible full-length post. Apologies to all those who thought I'd got lazy and decided to move the tweet format into my regular blog posts. However, for posterity, here are those notes: Why child-singing-gate is a PR perfect stormAll the ...

As published by the Sydney Morning Herald. No link to a Chinese version, no citation of a source, and no way of confirming if these are genuine. But they look pretty credible and consistent with prior guidelines from the propaganda bureau. Nothing surprising or extra scandalous, at least from my perspective (your mileage may vary). But interesting ...