About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Ladies and gents — it’s a great pleasure joining the great team at CNReviews.com. My name is David Feng — you may have known me from what used to be blognation China, or my current gigs, the BeiMac Union, techblog86 and Beijingology. Additionally, I write for Shanghaiist, blog with City Weekend (for their The Beijingologist column), and am a frequent guest on Beijing Radio (in everything travel-related). That’s quite a lot of stuff I’ve on my plate…

Beijing is an interesting place for me. I was born here (in fact, 26 years ago today — how time flies!), witnessed the city through the era of the planned economy (I think I still have a voucher for a rice ration I never claimed), witnessed the price of bus tickets rising from the old “red ticket” of just CNY 0.05 to what the prices are now (still not that expensive — CNY 0.40), and witnessed bridges being built all over the city. Since returning here for the long term beginning in mid-2000 (after 12 years in Switzerland), I’ve completed my Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and International Finance, and now hold a Master of Arts in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from the School of Media/Broadcasting Arts at the Communications (Media) University of China.

I’ve been blogging for quite a bit — since late 2005. When I first heard of blogs in 2003, I thought they were “decadent places full of foul language” that I had to keep my own 101 miles from — but I soon realized just how much I was missing (and to some extents, how wrong I was). I started my personal blog, Raccolta Online, on December 29, 2005. Times have changed, but the blog has always been there. My blogging commitments expanded in late 2007 as I wrote for blognation China, and it has kept expanding in 2008 with techblog86, Shanghaiist, and now CNReviews.com.

After doing about a dozen articles for the Wikipedia on the freeways around Beijing, I found out that there was an audience for this thing (amazingly enough). In fact, at one point, the editor of a freeway mag offered me a job! So with the interest there (and with me never a big fan of the rather complex GFDL), I started Beijingology on a trial basis in mid-2006, with much of the work getting underway for real in late May 2007. Beijingology is a wiki and blog about the city of Beijing that — obviously — has no end.

Last but not least, most of you (or some of you) may know me as the Mac guy in Beijing and around the PRC. That’s all because of the Beijing Macintosh User Group, and now the BeiMac Union. There are over 600+ like-minded Mac geeks and ordinary Mac folks inside the BeiMac world; I probably wouldn’t have met one of them were it not for Mr D’Arcy’s “just grand” Mac lessons back in elementary school in Switzerland. That got me into the tech world as early as 1991, and no matter what I’m into these days — tweeting, Dopplr-ing or hanging out with Linux/open source people, all roads point back to that computer class in autumn 1991.

The one thing that I love is languages. I consider both English and Chinese to be native tongue-ish languages, and German, French and Italian following closely behind. I’m also OK with a bit of Japanese and Korean, can read Spanish and Rhaeto-Rumansh with few problems, and even know a bit of Latin from high school. I’m not sure how this might work out at CNReviews.com; for that, I’ll have to refer you to my own blogs, which feature content even in Swiss-German…

It’s great being part of CNReviews.com, and I hope you enjoy my tech and urban posts!