I apologize to my regular readers who have been wondering why I dropped off the face of the blogosphere for the past week. In fact, I spent several days traveling over the weekend because I was scubadiving on a sunken Ming dynasty town in Qiandaohu (Thousand Island Lake), a reservoir created by the damming of the Xin'an River near Hangzhou back in 1959. I shot some underwater video there and will YouTube it when I have it edited into watchable shape.Read more »

Ten years ago if you had asked me if I would ever want to spend time at a site where millions of average people could upload their home videos, I would have sniffed in disdain. That is why, despite years spent toiling in the technology industry, I am still not a multimillionaire and spend most of my time anchored to a cubicle rather than shooting hoops on my superyacht, which is what I'd hoped for.

So it goes. We can't all be winners or we'd have no one to envy. And I've come around to the charms of video-sharing sites like YouTube, going so far as take my own first foray following my recent trip to Xinjiang. One of the best China blogs around, Danwei, regularly posts funny and well-produced video clips featuring the vast weirdness that is China. The Chinese, not to be left out of the fun, have also launched a couple of video-sharing sites of their own. Some of them might be headed for trouble.Read more »

I have to be honest. Most Chinese Web sites break my head completely. Clicking into your average Chinese portal or social networking site is like being dropped into the Web equivalent of a raging, psychedelic pachinko parlor. The page scrolls on forever, there are countless hundreds of links, boxes, windows and options, and every other thing blinks, waves or breaks loose and starts gliding across the page. If you read Chinese laboriously and slowly, like me, this is extra painful.

I spent many years designing and managing the development of Web sites and I was raised on a philosophy of simplicity and relative minimalism. In China this brands me as a dangerous heretic who should probably be locked up for his own safety. Nevertheless (showing my age), I remain firm in my conviction that the best Web sites are clean, easy to navigate, and don't overwhelm you with options or distractions. This is particularly true of sites that purport to be instructional or educational. That's one of many reasons I was disappointed with a new site dedicated to teaching Chinese that I explored this week.Read more »

On average, the Chinese don't like the Japanese very much. The memory of the war has never entirely faded, not least because the Government ensures that it doesn't. I am often struck by the casual hostility directed at Japan by Chinese people who are not only too young to remember the war, but whose parents are too young to remember. Recently, in Xinjiang, three Chinese Uighur men on a bus told me of their dislike for the Japanese because of the war. You'd be hardpressed to find many other areas where the Uighur and Han (China's ethnic majority) are of one mind. On a flight from Urumqi back to Beijing the next day, a young university student in the seat next to me lamented that her Sony laptop and Canon digital camera were Japanese. She wasn't happy about that, but had to admit that "they make the best stuff". Read more »

I've written about China's mag-lev train a couple of times, but it's another train altogether that's making headlines this week: The newly opened Qinqhai-Tibet Railway that links the Tibetan capital of Lhasa with the rest of China. There is now, for the first time, a direct rail link from the national capital, Beijing, all the way to Lhasa, although you can expect to spend 48 hours on the train to make the journey.

Outside China, the train is controversial, with many reports commenting on its potential to bring a flood of new Han (China's ethnic majority) migrants into Tibet, possibly risking the plateau's unique culture. Inside China, where coverage is somewhat circumscribed, it's the achievement of constructing the world's highest train--much of it at altitudes over 4,000m--and the necessary technological wizardry that are getting covered.Read more »