Out and About

It’s been a while since we’ve done a reading round-up–here a few things we’ve been reading (and writing) on the web lately: 1. If you’ve been picking up rumblings about “soy sauce” and “push ups” and haven’t been able to sort out the details, the always savvy Sky Canaves (with Juliet Ye this time) at Wall Street Journal‘s China Blog sorts it out for you. Check out Time‘s report for the basics. As CDT reports, debates over the Wengan riots have turned to the topic of internet censorship, while EastSouthWestNorth notesthat discussions of the incident are cooling down. 2. Looking for some last minute Olympic reading? Try Jeff Wasserstrom’srecommended list at Huffington Post. (Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeff W. posted another piece there on the Chinese internet yesterday–please join us in mocking the little grey head cutouts). We have a few more China Beat-related pieces on the line at HuffPost soon, so we’ll let you know when they go up too. 3. Tang Buxi over at Blogging for China continues his interesting work in a recent post on comparisons, corruption, and government buildings. 4. Danwei blogs that “China votes for Obama,” in a posting by Thomas Crampton on the results of the Asia Society’s survey (though it should be noted that this survey is neither scientific–it is a tiny sample–nor just about China–leaders from all over Asia were interviewed; in any event, the interviews are interesting). 5. The Olympics are coming, and so are the predictions for Olympic events. Not the sporting events, of course. The real betting surrounds what will go wrong, and in how many ways. As a report at Shanghaiist notes, Slate is running a “Summer Olympics Disaster Guide,” an overly gleeful guide to August rubbernecking (The tagline: “What could go wrong in Beijing? Everything.”) Other outlets have continued to flog the old standbys of pollution and Chinglish