Wednesday, December 1, 2004

Sex on TV in China Starting January 1, 50 local Chinese channels will air 'The Masks'. This program will be the first TV program in which participants can talk freely about sex. Because this is still very much a taboo subject in China and in order to avoid embarrassment, the participants will all be wearing masks. The China Daily said about the show: "Breaking the taboo of talking about sex in public, the show reflects a changing society, and a positive change at that." 7:54:27 PM    comment []

Fast food growing fast While walking from the China Bay offce to the Toodou.com office I noticed that another KFC opened its doors in our neighbourhood. We now have 5 KFC[base ']s within 1 kilometer from our house already. And there are always people eating, be it in the morning, the afternoon or at night. The new store seemed to have no table free at lunchtime, and that on the opening day. Next to the 5 KFC[base ']s there are at least 2 McDonalds and 3 Pizza huts in the same area, and of course numerous Chinese fast food outlets. This is probably a higher density than any city in Europe has. I won[base ']t be surprised if Chinese in a couple of years will be just as overweight as the average American nowadays. It is that overweight is still regarding as a a characteristic of being rich (at least for men), otherwise there could be a huge business opportunity here. 7:34:58 PM    comment []

Google News China Herald noted on Monday that Google News is blocked now in China. In the comments readers mentioned that in Guangzhou everything worked fine (south of China is probably less regulated), and later that Shanghai also worked again. However, this morning I noted that Google News is again not working without using a proxy server. But the censors forgot one thing: when you do a normal search the first three Google news results automatically pop up, and can be clicked on. 11:55:12 AM    comment []