Recommended Readings

There was more "strolling" in China this week (see #4), and these are the pieces we enjoyed in our own strolls around the internet this week...

1) Head over to Beijing Sounds for a thoroughly enlightening and entertaining piece by Randy Alexander on spoken Chinglish--and particularly the sort that results from transcribing English using Chinese characters (yep, you read correctly--follow the link for images of the texts that teach using this method and even the amazing audio clips of what English spoken this way sounds like).

2) Victor Cha wonders if the Olympic Games were "too perfect"?

3) China Beat's Jeffrey Wasserstrom has been publishing pieces in a variety of locations, including one in the Chicago Tribune on the parallels between the Chicago World's Fair and the Beijing Games and another in Far Eastern Economic Review titled "Confucius: China's Comeback Kid."

4) The "stroll" lives on as political protest this week, this time in Beijing. Danwei reports.

5) As David Bandurski noted at China Media Project yesterday, much of the mainland coverage of the Chen Shuibian graft case has been posed as an indictment of democracy. But Bandurski has translated an interesting commentary from Cheng Jinfu that argues there are other lessons to draw from it.