New Blog

I've started working on a group blog with Charles Custer, a recent Brown graduate living in Harbin. He's been running great posts on Ai Weiwei's search for truth in the rubble of Sichuan schools. I'll keep my political commentary, which has probably been boring for most of you anyway, contained to that blog, chinageeks. For those of you interested in that dry stuff, you can check it out. Charles updates it frequently. I'll keep my posts here more focused on less political things that will probably be of more interest to the three of you who still check this.

Another First/Largest for China

Today, I saw this story on the cover page of the Jinghua Times, a Beijing daily:

China to Build Largest Transfer Station in Asia

While it's great that Beijing's adding more subway lines, is a transfer station actually something to brag about much less make front page news?

As I noted a couple weeks ago, the largest anything is often viewed as something that should a source of pride for the Chinese people (or so the people behind the building of it hope). But here is a case where size is objectively a bad thing. This transfer station will only involve the meeting of three lines. Three lines meet often on other subways without requiring such a large transfer point. A subway transfer point shouldn't be tiny, but anyone who's been in Xizhimen, Dongzhimen, Guomao or any of the many other ten-minute-long transfers in Beijing knows that larger is not better. I wonder when the Beijing city planners are going to stop trying to make things bigger and simply make them convenient.


Note: Sorry you have all been missing out on the riveting details of my life and my profound insights over the last couple weeks. I'm working on a time-consuming project, so posts will continue to be sporadic until that's over.

五毛党 Fifty Cent Party

Contrary to the title, this post has nothing to do with the cool American rapper who I'm going to get down with on my birfday.

The wumaodang, or fifty cent party (link blocked in China), are a group of Chinese probably numbering in the thousands who go onto Internet chat rooms and BBS pages to write posts that support the communist party. They get paid fifty cents for each post that criticizes other subversive netizens.

Today, as I was wandering around tianya, an Internet portal, I saw that some Chinese internet users abbreviate the term wumaodang 'wmd,' probably to avoid the censors. I don't think the Chinese are aware what this means in English, but I thought it was pretty funny since my sophomore year policy debate topic was on WMDs, a/k/a weapons of mass destruction.

我今天发现有些中国网民会把五毛党写成wmd。英文里也有这个简称：WMD就是大规模销毁武器的意思。中国网民实在太厉害了。