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In a country where piracy is a way of life and the circumscription of art by government muddies its social value, the Chinese Ministry of Culture has demonstrated crackerjack legislative priorities by, wait for it, banning lip synching. This follows the well known lip-synch scandal at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and various other ...

Look at the expression on the pearl ox and then ask yourself, where is the girl's right hand?   Because an ox figurine made with 130,000 pearls that conspicuously invokes the Wall Street ''bull'' statue doesn't seem, you know, vulgar or anything on the eve of a walloping recession. (By the way, the recession will be a real test of China's ...

Imagethief was not in the least surprised to hear that Chinese netizens were outraged that movie actress Gong Li has taken Singapore citizenship. But then, Imagethief is not in the least surprised by anything that outrages Chinese netizens. Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in ''Memoirs of Geisha'', alongside ...

Regular readers will recall that Imagethief became a father earlier this year. Having a child requires new parents to undertake many unfamiliar responsibilities. These include the obvious, such as the care and feeding of an infant, and some things that you really just don't think much about in advance. Among those are the bureaucratic hoops that ...

I don't normally go for the straight Chinglish stuff, but this one is worth sharing. Via Language Log:   Full explanation at Language Log. A better translation of this might be, ''The world's biggest sporting celebration is about to burst forth!'' But even so, the copy writing is, shall we say, unfortunate. Hat tip: Bishop Joey

These two have been patrolling my housing complex for the past week. I haven't seen them make any collars yet, but I've been surfing much less sm*t than usual, just in case:   Note: Don't know who Jingjing and Chacha are? Click here. Or, to see them in action, here.  

Imagethief likes the Mid-Autumn Festival. I like it because even though it actually comes in late summer, it reminds me of autumn, and autumn is famously the nicest time of year in Beijing. In any year devoid of Olympic rigging, late summer in Beijing is intolerably hot, muggy and polluted. This year it was merely hot. Over the years many people ...

Like a giant kid who's been holding a fart in during a three week elevator ride, Beijing has apparently relaxed its many industrial sphincters and let a big one rip. That's the only way I can explain the lighting-fast deterioration in air quality. In the space of about 36 hours the skies have transformed from the Olympic blue we all got perhaps ...

For those who are a bit weary of the whole idea of corporate pavilions, Media magazine has a witty review of the pavilions of all of the Olympic TOP sponsors. Each is helpfully compared to the Olympic athlete or icon that it most resembles. Two examples:China MobileSMS a vote on your favourite Olympic photograph and receive a set of stickers and ...

From the ''you couldn't make it up'' department here in Imagethief Towers, an old-school China Daily gem:City gets tough on foreign jaywalkersBy Zhan Lisheng (China Daily)The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is taking stern action against foreigners who break traffic rules, the public security bureau said Tuesday.It follows tough measures ...