The author is a columnist and culture critic with China Daily
This month last year, a bunch of snapshots of Hong Kong star Edison Chen and several starlets engaged in extremely explicit scenes surfaced online.
This has been a year of extremes - extreme joys and extreme sorrow. It was a year many celebrities decided to tie the knot, or bear children, or emigrate overseas, at least in name; and it was a year amateur photographers made history without the aid of Photoshop.
This has been an uneven year for Chinese cinema. On the one hand box-office revenues are expected to reach a new high, on the other hand mediocrity still reigns supreme. This makes it a daunting task to pick 10 shining examples of cinematic excellence.
What do Oprah Winfrey and Wen Jiabao have in common? They can both catapult obscure works into bestsellers. The American television host opened a book club, a segment on her extremely popular talk show, in 1996 and has since recommended dozens of books, increasing their sales by as much as a million copies each. Hence, the "Oprah effect".
Last week, I was in Phoenix - not John McCain's homeplace in Arizona, but the small town in west Hunan province. I was invited to attend a forum for young writers and critics. I did not make the cut in age, but "young" is flexible in China and I've seen a 55-year-old placed in this category. Fortunately, most of the attendees happened to fall neatly into one age bracket: They were born in the 1970s, which automatically makes them "post-70ers", or "70-hou" in Chinese.
Song Zude is a one-man tabloid. In his Sina.com blog, he has been making statements so outrageous it's a wonder nobody has sent an assassin his way.
What's so special about the term that literally means "mountain village" and is suddenly making headlines everywhere.
What started as an open-and-shut case of police brutality has morphed into a Rashomon where truth is elusive.
On October 5, while signing autographs at a Wuxi bookstore, an author was taken by surprise - he was slapped twice on the face by a reader.
Early this month, while on an assignment in Hohhot, I was taken on a tour of Mengniu and Yili, two of the most prominent businesses in Inner Mongolia. I was so impressed by what I saw that I called my wife right there in a corridor overlooking the assembly line.
After the successful Olympic opening ceremony, director Zhang Yimou rode a carousal of media interviews. In one of them he revealed that a member of the organizing committee of the 2012 London Games "invited" him to their show. Zhang turned down the offer.
The New York Times reported that a pair of statues, a gift from China, has received the cold shoulder in Italy.
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