A nod to Danwei

I just recommended one particularly interesting article from the Danwei news blog, but (if, by some strange chance, you haven't come across it already - it has a huge following amongst expats here in China) it is well worth checking out on a regular basis.

Indeed, for my money, there is only one essential 'China blog', and Danwei is it.

It's a fascinating, funny, often unbelievable roundup of China news, most of it translations of Chinese media articles (including bulletin board posts and blogs). I particularly recommended Liu Qi's gripe about the most common annoyances of modern life in China from a week or two ago, but other recent gems have included the annual roundup of the most common names in China (momentous news: Wang has just leapfrogged ahead of Li as the most common surname, apparently), the Ministry of Culture's fumbling attempt to explain and justify its crackpot new scheme for introducing a system of certification for 'cultural professions' (thought by many to be aimed at discouraging the proliferation of TV talent shows: they might run short of contestants if people had to pass a music exam before being allowed to sing in public), and the "It could only happen in China" revelation that the pre-Mayday special edition of the Beijing Evening News was so big that news vendors were hoarding it, refusing it sell it to customers because.... it was worth more to them as scrap paper! (Astounding, but true.)

There's wonderful stuff like that on there almost every week.

And over the past year they've also started adding a lot of self-shot video content, archived on the sister site Danwei TV. The latest clip shows the rather lovely musician Wu Fei talking about her instrument, the guzheng. A favourite from the archives is this film of American folkie Abigail Washburn (who does a mini tour out here each November) and her band jamming with musicians from the Mongolian folk group Hanggai on a hutong rooftop. And then there's the Sexy Beijing series, in which the irrepressible Anna Sophie Loewenberg (who does indeed manage to be strangely sexy - despite sporting the scary hair and horn-rimmed specs of a Gary Larson matron) hits the streets to conduct frivolous vox pop interviews (she's probably aiming for the sly satire of Louis Theroux, but mostly comes across more like a young Esther Rantzen - but still, pretty funny most of the time).

Of course, I have my gripes about Danwei (the name is the Chinese for 'work unit', the basic building block of social administration under the old-style Communist regime, and still extant to this day, although declining in importance as the economy grows and diversifies). It's sometimes a little too prolific for its own good (hey, I should talk, right?!): if you fail to check in for half a week, you can sometimes find 10 or more huge posts to wade through. It can be a little bit po-faced at times (although its coverage does seem to have diversified somewhat over the past year and a bit, moving away just a little from its original primary focus on the Chinese media industry to become more wide-ranging and quirky, as it tries to embrace the huge, nebulous, bizarre topic of modern 'urban life'). And it does tend to flaunt its creators' 'mastery' of Chinese a little unnecessarily (I see little need to pepper almost every article with quotations in Chinese; only rarely are the original Chinese characters of particular interest or relevance; and, in those cases, it would be nice to offer the pinyin romanization of them alongside - there are software programs that will do this for you automatically in a little pop-up balloon).

Nevertheless, it is a rare example of a 'serious' blog that maintains a sense of humour; and it has become an invaluable "window on China". A must-view for anyone interested in this strange, wonderful, crazy country.