Saying Goodbye to CNReviews… and Entering The Divide

My readers here on CNReviews have probably noticed that I haven’t blogged in quite some time. One of them probably wonders what happened. The other is probably hoping I’m actually dead.

Actually, I’m still around, as most of my hard-earned enemies and trolls rue whenever I pop up making the odd comment or 20 on my favorite garden of low-hanging fruit, chinaSMACK.

Oh boy, some of you are going to chafe at that one.

Heh, good.

However, the main reason I haven’t been posting much here on CNR is because I’ve been busy organizing a crack team of royal ass-kickers excellent bloggers and developing a new China blog.

But before I introduce this new blog, I want to publicly thank Elliott and CNR for having me here.

Kai and CNR, sitting in a tree…

I’ve been contributing posts to CNR for almost exactly two years now and last April, I had taken over as the main blogger and a part-time lead editor of sorts. Elliott and I had re-envisioned CNR and then rebooted it with a new design. At the time, we were getting ~30k visits a month. Today, CNR is enjoying 50k+ visits a month, which is not bad, considering that we haven’t updated recently nor have we been updating regularly over the past few months.

Even so, we had made the mistake of positioning CNR to be too much too soon, a harsh reality that set in over the subsequent months. Elliott spawned his third child and it, along with his day job, prevented him from blogging much about China. Min, through whom I first met Elliott, had retired into becoming a full-time quant, deciding that she wasn’t too keen on English blogging. As for me, as time went on, I realized that most of my posts revolved around socio-political commentary about contentious, divisive issues involving China and the Chinese. Yet CNR was to be more than just my personal opinions and rhetoric on cross-cultural politics and perceptions. The more I posted, the more my personal interests skewed what CNR professed to offer and deliver.

We had planned to scout and recruit other writers to join our little party, and over the past year, we’ve been blessed with contributions by Baoru, mollie, the BloggerInsight team (Ying, Lucas, and Kai Lukoff), Elizabeth, Aimee Barnes, voodikon,  and finally C. Custer. Unfortunately, we never managed to develop and keep the right team of people to adequately cover the many broad fields we so over-enthusiastically committed ourselves to.

And then…?

Several months ago, faced with this cognitive dissonance, I began rethinking my relationship with blogging on CNR. I had always wanted to build a reasonably “successful” blog.  By “successful”, all that meant was that the blog would be notable for something. I had also always wanted to accomplish this with a team of like-minded individuals, a group of people who would push each other, challenging each other to become better, all towards the goal of developing a notable blog. Why a blog, as opposed to, say, “curing world hunger?” Because a blog fulfills my personal interest in writing commentary, reacting, responding, and influencing the world I live in and the people I share this world with, even if it’s a wee tiny bit.

How very democratic of me, right?

I decided that CNR wasn’t the right platform for me to pursue my goals, despite my immense purely heterosexual love for Elliott. Even if I redesigned and rebooted it to be focused on the socio-political commentary I wanted to spend most of my free time writing, I would always be annoyed with the domain name. While CNReviews or “China Reviews” is perfectly fine for a blog broadly covering “People, Business, and Life in China”, but it doesn’t quite convey “socio-political commentary”. Blogging under CNR is like wearing boxers that are 10 times too large.

I’m Asian, I know my genetic limitations.

As such, I sought out fellow bloggers that shared my interest in writing socio-political commentary about issues facing and involving modern China. They also had to occupy a similar position as me on the ideological spectrum. They couldn’t be unrepentant “panda huggers”, nor unrepentant “panda bashers”. If they were, we’d end up clawing at each other’s faces too much to really cooperate. A good sense of humor wouldn’t hurt either.

Fortunately, I’ve been following the English-language China blogosphere for quite some time, and have come to know and admire quite a few people. So, I set some large steel traps where I knew they’d frequent and then waited in the bushes for the tell-tale clank of triumph.

Within days, I had caught me a Custer and an Abrams. While the Abrams is a bit more mangier than the younger Custer, both are fantastic specimens of bloggers who regularly and consistently publish critical, incisive, and nuanced commentary about modern China issues. After they agreed not to run away, I let them out of the traps and attached the collars.

CNR, compared to many other well-known small English-language China blogs, is pretty successful given the amount of traffic we pull, even when we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs doing absolutely nothing. Of course, we’re no chinaSMACK or Shanghaiist, nor Danwei. Hell, we’re not even an ESWN. All blogs I — and we — admire and respect.

But 50,000+ visits a month is pretty decent for a small blog like CNR, and it suggests we’ve done something right. Therefore, giving up this built-in traffic up is hard, but it only makes sense for my captives and I to start a brand new blog, from square one, fresh, with a clean sheet.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done.

Entering the already crowded “English-language China blogosphere”, is china/divide, a daily updated group blog publishing social and political commentary on news and issues involving modern China written by Charles Custer, Stan Abrams, and your’s truly. We’re like the Three Amigos, except I’m not white bread. And, if everything goes according to plan, we won’t remain at three.

The first post is by Stan, titled “Goat Meat, Loose Women, and the Imperfect China Dialogue“, and it delivers. Of course, over the next few days, Custer and I will also rear our ugly heads, and henceforth, china/divide will be the place to read what much of what we think, and then proceed to disagree and hate us for it.

Please, do come and take a look.

As for CNR, given that I will be spending most of time and energies on china/divide, I’m formally saying “so long, and thanks for all the fish.” Ironically, and much to his consternation, just as Elliott’s starts a stint in Shanghai and may have more time to regularly blog on CNR, I’m seemingly abandoning him. I wouldn’t quite put it that way though. I can’t make any promises, but I don’t think this is the goodbye forever between CNR and myself, and I may guest post here in the future, especially if the subject-matter falls under CNR’s umbrella more than china/divide’s.

But then again, which one of you actually enjoyed my non-socio-political commentary posts anyway?

See you in the divide.