Yesterday a guy was buying a snack for one of my favorite street dogs, huang guang, aka the fox. Knowing that almost every part of the chicken or duck or whatever is eaten, I wonder what they give to dogs as extra snacks. My best guess so far is sack full of chicken penises.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 68% [?]

The CNNIC just released new internet usage numbers for China. Lyn Jeffery at Virtual China summarized the major points of the report.

* 137 million Internet users, a 23% growth rate in 2006, compared with just above 18% growth rate in both 2005 and 2004
* 10.5% Internet penetration rate
* over 30% of Beijing’s population is online
* the .CN domain name grew at a rate of over 64% compared to 2005 (probably still fewer in total than .COM, would be my guess). China is said to be entering “the .CN era”
* 75% of Internet users are using broadband connections (xDSL, cable modem, or leased line)
* a bit above 12% of Internet users, or 17 million, have accessed the Internet through their mobile phones (compared to 13 million in July 2006)
* mobile Internet users are primarily male, unmarried, aged 18-24, work in an enterprise, and live in cities and towns
* 72% of mobile Internet users are mainly going online to send and receive email, while 31% are browsing news
* biggest issues for mobile Internet users are the high price and slow connection speed

Of course this makes the post I did on Chinese bloggers somewhat outdated.

Popularity: 26% [?]

While many store signs here have nonsensical English words, this sign is something special:

If you can’t make it out from the picture, the store is call Life Style and underneath the store name is “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir…” I wanted to ask the owner why he chose to use a quote from the Leonard Cohen song “Bird on a Wire” to advertise his store but it looks like it has been closed for a long time. Maybe it was a sneaky political statement, as the next line in the song is “I have tried in my way to be free”. The “…” may indicate a connection to this thought. Or it could just be one of his favorite songs. I will probably never know.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Nanjing has instituted a new vagrant dog law recently. Through the news and newspapers here I have gather together bits and pieces of information. Yesterday I bit the bullet and sat down and tried to translate an article out of the newspaper. Of course this was almost impossible but I did get some information of it. Headline:

How Dogs Should Be Managed, Come and Talk About It
February 6th, Nanjing is Conducting a Hearing to Listen to Citizen’s Objections Regarding the Dog Management Legislation

Apparently since the 11th of January they have taken in more 360 vagrant dogs. Residents and work places can register to participate on January 31st. They also list 10 major objections to the dog law, and from what I can tell most of them have to do with no dog park to take your ridiculous looking pekingese to. A opinion from someone about this issue (who is quoting someone, although I don’t know who):

Small Area Should be a Dog Walking Area
“A Dog is an animal, if it doesn’t exercise it can easily fall ill. Since this city has 10 thousand dogs, we should open up a specialized piece of land to serve as a public dog walking area. I think this way is scientific!” The city should start the young ladies proposal of new rules and regulations that would be able to grant a legal area for dog walking.

How a public dog area helps vagrant dogs I don’t know.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I used the last line from one of the funniest Achewood strips ever for two reasons. One is that it’s funny. And also I’m curious what kind of search results it will bring up.

I have been receiving more spam lately, about 10 a day. Almost all of them have something to do with Advil cold and sinus. But since yesterday I have received 58 spam comments. Drastic times call for drastic measures. I installed a plugin called “Did You Pass Math”. It asks a simple math question to verify that you are indeed a person and not some kind of spam bot. Let me know if this is working ok.

Popularity: 17% [?]

I enjoy looking through dictionaries, be they straight English or the English/Chinese combo I have been using lately. And sometimes you come across something really interesting like this for the entry 黑人 (hei1ren2):

1. Black Person, African-American
2. A person who has no residence card

What?

Popularity: 22% [?]

I don’t know how many times I have seen this statistics, and this time in an article from the Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh:

It is also giving companies a headache in a market laden with cultural and business challenges. China is home to 132 million Internet users, second only to the U.S. And according to one government estimate, there are 20 million Chinese bloggers, of whom 3.2 million write actively.

The part I’m curious about is where do these numbers come from. “One government estimate” is not all that clear. A government estimate that I can’t seem to find the source of. From the site www.internetworldstats.com and many other web statistics sites I have looked at the 132 million user seems an agreed upon number, an increase of 486.7 % from the previous year. Impressive. Not as impressive as Myanmar’s 29,900.0 % increase in users, but that’s not really a fair comparison.

But what about those blog estimates. I’ve seen different estimates from different places, but lets use these numbers for now. From the quote about only 3.2 million are active blogs, meaning that they are actually current and still being updated. That means only 16% of Chinese blogs are active. And if we make the assumption that these are 1 blog equals one person (probably not true but works for this example) that means that only 2% of Chinese internet users have blogs, and that represents only .2% of the Chinese population on the whole, 1,317,431,495 people.

So then, the usual questions arise. How representative of the country as a whole are these bloggers, and what view point are they representing.

For more reading and more numbers that might possibly be useless:

Internet Usage in Asia
Chinese Bloggers On the Rise
Chinese Statistics. Go Figure!

Popularity: 49% [?]

While Jenn does her research about women working in “China Rising” (my hatred of that phrase and concept will be discussed in some upcoming post), I continue to research what I came here to study: Dogs! Today I met a dog named 球球，QiuQiu, or ball ball. He is a large white pekingese, and whose name I guessed was Big White, judging from the other dog I know of who is the same breed and is named small white. Here is a portrait that Jenn took of him a few days ago:

He sleeps on a box in the flower store where his owner works. A surprisingly mild mannered dog, he spends most of his time looking out the window or shuffling around sniffing things.

Popularity: 11% [?]

As I’m sure you have already heard, the first drive through opened in Beijing yesterday. I didn’t know about it until my mom told me, which is kind of strange since I live here. But I don’t understand why the media is making such a big deal of this. It’s not like this is the first McDonald’s here, there are already an assload. Is it just an excuse for Americans to make jokes about how fat Chinese people will get? Or just another small nugget of information to dispense because its easier then informing people about important topics of a country that they probably know very little about? I think both are probably true.

McDonald’s also just brought back the spicy fish fillet, which I love. Delicious spicy mayonnaise!

Popularity: 21% [?]