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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

That's a good question, and it was posed in an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal by Geoffrey Fowler. As the article notes, the answer is ''yes'', depending on who you ask:Was China's Olympic-torch relay around the world a miserable failure or a surprising success? Yes.To observers in the U.S. and Europe, Beijing's international ...

Imagethief is aware that this blog is at risk of becoming ''all Olympics, all the time''. This isn't intentional, but when you write about PR, communication and China its rather hard to ignore the symbolism, conflict and dueling narratives swirling around recent events. I promise I'll write something funny soon, if for no other reason than I could ...

From CNN.com, a report that the Chinese government will meet with a representative of the Dalai Lama. This strikes Imagethief as something that be the result of a piece of external advice. You know, it would really look good if you would at least sit down with them... But who knows. Perhaps its a totally sincere effort at a constructive ...