About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Kai Pan, frequent CN Reviews commenter and Shanghai entrepreneur, joins CN Reviews with a guest post.  Kai also works in the advertising industry in Shanghai.  In my discussions with Kai, who grew up in California, I’ve learned a lot from his observations about life in China from his point of view as a Chinese-American, expat, and social critic! - Elliott

The 80,000-seat Shanghai Stadium played host to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games Promotional Concert Tour last Saturday, replete with (mostly) minor celebrities providing wholesome entertainment to get everyone’s patriotic juices flowing. Hometown Shanghai Olympic athletes, Sun Wen (women’s soccer football) and Le Jingyi (women’s swimming) both made appearances, but commercial darlings Liu Xiang (110 metre hurdles world-record holder) and Yao Ming (really tall Chinese guy on the NBA’s Houston Rockets) were notably absent. Despite the hosts repeatedly emphasizing “80,000 seats” to the cameras, at least 75,000 members of the audience were also absent. 

Personal highlights for the show included watching the audience members that weren’t absent disregard their assigned seats to move front and center, and the excellent music video that accompanied pop-rock band Blue Garden’s performance…until I realized it was just a bunch of Warcraft III cut-scenes with their lyrics overlaid.

Nonetheless and with all sincerity, there were plenty of worthwhile performances and personalities. Nothing quite guilts you into being inspired like appearances by 2007 Special Olympics participants. Plus, my ticket was completely free.

Hell, I would’ve even paid the 5 RMB the ticket scalpers were asking for outside.

More:
- Sohu.com coverage here (video, Chinese).
- QQ.com coverage here (text, Chinese, distracting scantily-clad ladies in sidebar).

We had an internal contest on “Planning Your Chinese New Year” in Kango before Chinese New Year - we want to share with the US team that how Chinese people celebrate this annual holiday. One of my colleague Xu from Hubei said he was going to visit a Temple Fair (庙会，miàohuì) and I was very exciting about it since I’ve never been to a temple fair so asked for some images. Here are some great ones Xu shared with me.

Can you tell how many red lantern in this super lantern?

Another challenge of counting how many lantern are hanging on the tree!

年年有余（鱼）: Have fish （saving）evey year!

Hope to give you a sense of what the people like in China in a temple fair.

I don’t have an idea about of what’s the yellow stuff? Xu, can you tell us?

Temple fair is a traditional CNY event with long history. Today, it is a market fair that people can see Chinese New year decoration, buy stuff, eat local snacks and also see traditional folk performance. It is also an opportunity to feel the happiness of Chinese New Year from the crowds. Meg went to a temple fair in Beijing this Chinese New Year, check out her Baiyunguan Temple Fair trip.

Shanghai recorded the lowest temperature of this winter on Feb. 13, 2008, the first official working day of Chinese New Year. Good news is that the weather in most places of South China (except southwest China) is getting better and better. According to news reported at 10 a.m. on Feb. 13 by National Transportation Department, no traffic jams on freeways across the country. Here are some numbers about this freezing rain (aka. ice rain) natural disaster reported by Xihuanet (I pulled out the numbers from here and here).

8 people are missing.
107 people died.
21 Provinces were suffered.
354,000 houses clasped.
1,512,000 people were re-settled.
1,927,000 people were helped out from blocked vehicles and trains /train stations.
22.12 million households (93% of total of those lost electricity ) regained electricity by Feb. 11, 2008.
13.98 million RMB is granted by the government.
11.95 million RMB is donated.
1 billion RMB is compensated by insurance industry. [this could be the costliest catastrophe for the insurance industry in China ever.]
111.1 billion RMB is direct loss. [21,000 billion RMB is the total GDP of China in 2006]

I have thought the disaster was caused by snowstorm which made me feel a little guilty in celebrating snow in Shanghai. But later I found out that it is a similar disaster as the one happened in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick for 6 days in January 1998, when freezing rain coated everything 7-11 cm (3-4 in) of ice. Blame the ice not the snow. Here are some images collected the images from the web. that record this historical natural disaster. [keywords: 冻雨，冰灾，冻灾]