You may recall Foxconn, a.k.a. Honhai Precision Manufacturing, as the company at the center of a recent PR crisis for Apple Computer, when a British newspaper published reports that it was mistreating the workforce responsible for assembling luscious (and expensive) iPods. In the last few days, Apple, ever image-conscious, got round to publishing its own report on the situation, and this has largely faded from the public consciousness.

But Apple isn't the only company that was left scrambling to protect its reputation in the wake of the scandal. Foxconn, too, felt hard-done by, and is taking steps to assert itself. Unfortunately, rather than take constructive steps to reassure the international companies whose own brands were propped on Foxconn's labor practices, Foxconn instead decided to make an example of two Chinese journalists. This looks like a move that has the potential for a mighty backlash.Read more »

In China, the start of the Olympic Games is the meta-deadline that looms above everything else. The list of things that absolutely, positively must be finished by the Olympics is pretty daunting: Build the Olympic facilities, clean up Beijing's air, complete the extensive subway expansion, fix the traffic problems, get the Capital Steel factory moved to Tianjin, find a way to stop all that Gobi Desert dust from blowing into town, etc. From that list, I am guessing that "finish the Olympic facilities" will be the only one that will actually be completed. They'll bluff everything else. But perhaps that's just pessimism. When the Chinese put their minds to something, they can accomplish fantastic things.

The one other thing that is supposed to be ready by the Olympics is the commercial rollout of Digital Multimedia Broadcast (DMB), and the application that is being talked up for this technology is the ability to watch the games on your mobile phone. China is now planning to trial DMB broadcasts in 2007, with an eye on commercial deployment in time for the Olympic Games, in August 2008. But even if they get the system deployed, will people be able to watch? Or want to?Read more »

China's regulators have started looking askance at China's bubbling online "spoof" (恶搞 or "egao") scene, and new restrictions are coming. In recent months several high-profile parody videos have rocketed to popularity on the Internet. The phenomenon was quite nicely covered a few weeks ago by this thorough post on the Virtual China blog.

One of the better-known spoofs is a wicked parody of director Chen Kaige's overwrought film, The Promise, called The Bloody Affair of the Steamed Bun, and created by a young man named Hu Ge (downloadable here, but 50MB and in Chinese). Hu's parody earned him a lawsuit from the humor-impaired director, later dropped.Read more »

Clever Chinese gamers and Chinese game companies are finding creative ways to get around government rules designed to restrict how long people can play for.

Massively multiplayer online games are incredibly popular in China, where, by some estimates, more than 25 million young people while away the hours with virtual mayhem. In fact, with that number a year old, it's likely that another few million have since logged in and looked for fresh skulls to cleave.

But all has not been smooth sailing in the real world where, about a year ago, the Chinese Government took interest in the problem of "online game addiction". A series of alarming stories about youngsters unable to tear themselves away from computers and in some cases killing themselves after extended gaming sessions prompted both government action and lawsuits.Read more »

To see how popular the game of Chinese chess (xiangqi) is in Beijing, all you have to do is take a stroll through town on a summer evening. In the hutongs, on the lakeshores, or any old patch of sidewalk, you'll find pairs of people hunched over boards, pondering an arrangement of wooden disks on a grid. Often, five or six friends will be gathered around, watching the game with the kind of quiet, intense interest that westerners would reserve for a particularly tense golf or tennis match. Curbside operators will sometimes arrange a chess problem on a board and let passers-by bet money on a chance to solve it.

There does seem to be something of a generational and gender divide when it comes to Chinese chess, however. The players I've seen have generally been old men, as are most of the spectators. It seems like a different scene than mah jongg, the other game you often see being played out on the sidewalk when the weather is nice (and which, thanks to the distinctive and wall-penetrating rattle of the tiles as they are shuffled between rounds, you can hear being played year-round). Mah jongg players are likely to be a mix of men and women, and there seems to be a bit more latitude in age range. You're also more likely to see fistfuls of small bills being discreetly handled around a mah jongg table, which may account for the raucous atmosphere.Read more »