Tag Archives: Public Relations

Free laptops for NPC delegates – it looked good on paper

Let’s say you’re a company selling some kind of product. Let’s say your product is –let’s just pick something at random here– laptop computers. Globally, this is a heavily commoditized category jammed with companies selling look-alike products with similar feature … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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Google detonates the China corporate communications script

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 … Continue reading

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Chinese cyberspies? Sheer lies and heinous fabrications!

Alright, I confess I made up the “heinous fabrications” bit. But the “sheer lies” sound bite comes straight from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has clearly worked hard to make sure that its representatives around the world are working … Continue reading

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Sanlu melamine milk powder crisis becomes a national issue

Like on the top-forty radio show Imagethief used to listen to as a thirteen-year old, the hits keep coming in the Sanlu milk powder crisis. Over the past thirty-six hours the situation has evolved from a company-specific Sanlu crisis to … Continue reading

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Melamine in Sanlu milk powder? Now that’s a crisis!

If you want to get people mad –I mean fired-up, torch-and-pitchfork enraged– screw with their pets or their babies. That’s what we’ve learned over the past year thanks to the unfortunate tendency of the plastic melamine to pop up in … Continue reading

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Why I don’t care about the opening ceremony’s fraudulent footprints

Or so you would start to believe from the press reports over the last day. Some have dwelt upon the lip-synched singing of hyper-precious Lin Miaoke, the impossibly apple-cheeked munchkin girl who “sang” the laudatory and self-referentially titled “I sing … Continue reading

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Let me tell ya about Edison Chen’s dirty photos

With the possible exception of Disney villains, Imagethief cannot think of a group of people that more richly deserve their miserable fates than Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen and his cavalcade of cupcakes. If I sound unsympathetic here, that is … Continue reading

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China problems create rewards (and disasters) for PR risk takers

Note: This was originally two posts, published within a few days of each other. Part 1: China problems create rewards for PR risk takers (July 30, 2007) All PR has an element of risk to it. That’s one of the … Continue reading

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How to work with interpreters

I spend a lot of time working with interpreters, which can be trying. Interpretation is one of those things that it seems no one is ever entirely happy with. Someone always feels like some essential point or nuance didn’t make … Continue reading

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