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During the official mourning period declared a week after last month's Wenchuan earthquake, I put up a post remarking on the government message that replaced the foreign entertainment channels on my building satellite TV system. This got me zapped by a commenter who felt I was displaying ignorance of Chinese mourning rituals. While I disagreed ...

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today on some things that American technology companies are doing in addition to donations to help out with quake relief. Google, Microsoft and IBM are all using their technology in various ways to help out:Acting largely on its own initiative, the mostly China-based Google team built an Internet ...

A good Wall Street Journal article on how the vigorous response to the quake has helped China to improve its image:Natural disasters sometimes leave damaged governments among the rubble in their wake. But more than a week after a giant earthquake shook southwestern China, it is increasingly clear that the catastrophe has actually strengthened the ...

Good post from Stan Abrams at China Hearsay on companies (and individuals) being shamed into making contributions to earthquake relief:Humiliating individuals and enterprises for not contributing enough to earthquake relief is taking all this a bit too far. I applaud everyone, public and private, who has donated, physically participated in ...

On Monday, May 12th, Imagethief was on the 27th floor of the Kerry Center for a meeting at 2:28PM. We all spent a couple of spooky minutes at the window watching Kerry and Fortune Plaza sway alarmingly, not knowing that it was just the faintest echo of a far-away unfolding catastrophe. As a San Franciscan who has been through countless little ...

Have a read of this article in the Wall Street Journal that looks at the reaction of the activists that have been protesting the Beijing Olympics to China's devastating earthquake:Before the earthquake, China's image abroad had taken a beating. The first big blow came from news of violence in Lhasa and ethnic Tibetan areas elsewhere in China, and ...

Here is the screen being broadcast over every non-news foreign channel on my cable system in Beijing (click image for a larger version): In this case, it's from what is normally HBO, but it's the same for ESPN, National Geographic, MTV, and the French and Japanese channels we normally get. BBC and CNN are still permitted, including their ...

Sina has collected an illustrated master list of all the corporate donations to earthquake relief, ranked by size, and linked to company announcements. This makes it easy to see who's being generous and who's being stingy or, worse, hasn't donated at all. There is a running total at the top. You can also conveniently check who's donating by ...

Reports from the net and Twitter this morning that as part of the three days of official earthquake mourning, scheduled to begin this afternoon at 2:28PM, many and perhaps most entertainment venues, websites and broadcasting are to shut down. For more on the online side of this, including a translation of the Anhui provincial government notice on ...