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Chinese Internet celebrities, forums and other lurid scandals

Two interesting articles today, both having to do with Chinese Internet culture, and both leading into an ethical question that came up in a conversation recently. The question was this: Is it OK to put out “viral” videos that embed brands or have some kind of commercial message, but not identify the company behind them [...]

PowerPoint rangers and dumb-dumb bullets

It’s a few days old, but I loved this New York Times article about about the problems arising from the use of PowerPoint in military briefing in Afghanistan:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke [...]

Sinica Podcast 5: Huang Guangyu, plus the China property bubble

Once again I joined Kaiser Kuo and repeat offenders Bill Bishop, author of of Digicha and Sinocism, and Forbes Beijing bureau chief Gady Epstein for the Sinica podcast. This week’s blurb:

Huang Guangyu, the richest man in China, went on trial last week in Beijing. The founder of home electronics chain Gome was brought up on [...]

A handy cheat sheet for interpreting the Google China story

Should Google have been in China? Did they make the right move in pulling out? Will this influence the Chinese government? What does it mean for foreign businesses in China? Are they evil or not? Who knows? Not me. And none of these questions are going to be answered in this post.

But stick with me, [...]

Is Wal-Mart's eco-consciousness in China more than PR?

Sunday is shopping day in the Imagethief household, so this morning Mrs. Imagethief, Zachary and I bundled ourselves up and headed out to Wal-Mart.

Before you gasp in a fit of effete surprise, let me explain. As a card-carrying Bay Area intellectual snob, my pedigree is more Whole Foods than Wal-Mart, even if Whole Foods is [...]

Imagine my joy at this...

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

A few days ago, on the construction site across the main boulevard from where I live, a set of huge characters went up, exhorting the workers to “close the gap, finish the building”. OK, twenty-foot characters seemed a bit excessive, but exhortations [...]

Clearing the fog around Google China reports

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

A quick pointer to an excellent post at the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time blog, which busts several myths concerning Google in China that have been widely repeated in the past few days, including those concerning the health of Google’s business [...]

Google detonates the China corporate communications script

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

Imagethief stumbled blearily to his computer this morning expecting a relaxed scan of the news but found the Chinese Twittersphere ablaze with the news of Google’s bombshell blog post, which went up in the middle of the night early this morning our [...]

Paul Midler's "Poorly Made in China": Mischief, mayhem, soap

Note: This is cross-posted from the old Imagethief blog. The original post is here.

As a general rule, Imagethief dislikes business books, especially instructional ones. I find them tedious and most of them age faster than caviar on a car dashboard. There are, however, exceptions. Most of these are either books based on journalistic reporting of [...]