Group blog by David Feng, Min Guo, and Elliott Ng about the China blogosphere, travel, entrepreneurship, and urban lifestyle of the generations born in the 70s and 80s in China

photo (h/t ifgogo.com, zuosa.com)

There has been a tremendous outpouring of energy from the blogosphere and on Twitter to determine the best way to help out. This post provides a guide to how you can donate toward China earthquake relief efforts. We’ve now compiled over 35+ ways to give. Please add comments and links and I will keep this post updated. A SlideShare version of this post was also created by Oliver Ding.

I. Red Cross and various conduits

There is widespread consensus that donating to the Red Cross is the most reliable way to provide immediate disaster relief. Tuesday night BJ time, Bill Bishop (Niubi) hosted an auction with 15 mostly Chinese friends, and the consensus was the best way to give is to provide funds directly to the Sichuan provincial Red Cross. The next best option would be to give to the national Red Cross of China. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official: China will enter into three days of mourning beginning Monday, May 19, 2008 through to Wednesday, May 21, 2008. Recreational facilities will be suspended as citizens from around the nation remember their compatriots hit by this recent tragic earthquake.

At 14:28 on Monday, sirens and horns will sound for three full minutes to remember the victims of this terrible tragedy. The Olympic Torch Relay has also been halted for three days, this, too, to remember the recent disaster. On Twitter, we also hear news that CRI (China Radio International) may be planning something of a very different nature — instead of their regular music and lively chat. Things will, indeed, look somber, even over the airwaves.

Yours truly will be observing the nationwide period of mourning, too. All Twitter accounts (@DavidFeng in particular) will have their icons changed to a black square to indicate the period of mourning, and the davidfeng.com website will also change so that a message of mourning and grief takes the place of the normal web site. New projects which are slated to start this time will be pushed back for at least three days, and reduced updates will be the norm as everyone around us remembers those who lost their lives in this recent tragedy.

Recently, the earthquake has been virtually the sole topic all around town, in particular in one of yours truly’s gigs (the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall), but also, more significantly, around Twitter. Of somewhat of an odder note is the fact that the quake has somewhat disappeared from the Read the rest of this entry »

The China Business Network (TCBN) is sponsoring an invite-only cocktail party this Friday May 23 at the JWMarriott (北京JW万豪酒店, Beijing JW wàn háo jiǔdiàn) in Beijing. CNReviews is also a co-sponsor of the event. Space is limited to 150 people. If you want an invite, see the bottom of the post.

Originally the event centered around tech and VC attendees of the Asian Venture Capital Journal Conference and the CHINICT Conference in Beijing this week. But after the Sichuan earthquake, Christine Lu, Founder of The China Business Network decided to donate all proceeds to earthquake relief. From Christine:

The Library Project has created a program, “Project: Earthquake Relief”, to help rebuild the educational system that was affected as a result of the earthquake. It is projected that hundreds of elementary schools have been damaged in the Sichuan and Shaanxi Provinces. The Library Read the rest of this entry »

Oliver Ding create a SlideShare entitled “24+ ways to give“, based on our earlier post on methods (now up to 40) for China earthquake donations. It is another great way to share with people ways to help on earthquake relief for what has probably affected 20 million people. Thanks for your hard work on this Oliver.

| View | Upload your own

Read the rest of this entry »

Special times prompt special — well, special specials, pardon the pun. This week has been an extraordinary one, with the earthquake halfway through Monday shakings up.

First of all, a first-hand account about how things turned out in Beijing, at ground level. (The posts I quote were all written on Tuesday, a day after the quake.) As Kaiser Kuo recalls:

At 2:28 yesterday afternoon, I had stopped off at home in Beijing’s Central Business District after lunch and was writing an email to a VC friend of mine when I suddenly felt dizzy. For the first few seconds, I thought it was all in my head, but then there was the distinct sensation of physical movement. I asked my wife, “Is this an earthquake?” She was incredulous at first, but then found she almost lost her footing and held a wall for support. “It is an earthquake,” she said. I looked out the window toward the new office towers going up south of my building, and could have sworn I saw them swaying. We talked for a couple of seconds about what we should do–whether we should get under a doorway, or get downstairs. Then it all stopped, about 35 seconds afterward.

Nearly immediately after the quake, I myself got a flood of messages, all from people I knew, who were concerned with how things were in Beijing. As I wrote on my blog in the form of a letter to all my friends: Read the rest of this entry »

At 11:50 am BJ time 5/15, we just received via a comment on our earlier post of what appears to be a first-hand account of a 12 hour, 30 kilometre walk by students and teachers from the earthquake danger zone. We are posting the comment exactly as it was left (with a few typos corrected). Min is trying to contact the writer to interview her and to verify the story by phone or email. Stay tuned while we learn more…

Update by Min: I just talked to Zeng Juan (曾娟), an English teacher from 四川理工大学 成都美术学院 (Chengdu College of Fine Art) for about 15 mintues. The following report is an interview done by Juan after 64 students and 3 teachers (冉，钱 and 秦) went back from Tai An (泰安) to Chengdu(成都) safely. Three groups of students, each led by a teacher, went to Tai An town around Qingcheng Mountain (青城山) for outdoor sketch last Sat. (May 10). Supporting each other, 67 students and teachers walked for 12 hours and got back to college at around 9:30 am, 19 hours after the Wenchuan earthquake.

Juan also told me the current status in Chengdu and her college: None of the students in the colleges in Chengdu were hurt by the earthquake itself. But in extreme panic, a few of them got hurt by jumping from second floor of the building. She was at home when the earthquake happened and she thought it was a natual gas tan explosion when she heard huge sound and saw smoke. Currently, most of the local students in her school have gone home and the students from other provinces are staying in the conference hall and art museum of the school. Quan felt very sad about one of her friends who lost his wife in the earthquake. She works in Mian Yang (绵阳). — 6:27pm May 15.

New Long March–Walking Out of Death Zone in Earthquake China (by Juan Zeng)

As a teacher in Chengdu Arts College, Sichuan Technology University, Chengdu, I’d like to report the Long March about my students who had walked out the death zone in earthquake.

After 12 hours walking about 30 kilometres without any food or drink in heavy rain and wind, they escaped from death. Besides this, they helped others to escape. They are my heroes. I’d like to record this for my wonderful students to show my respect. The love is the way to life and hope. Read the rest of this entry »

Being an UpTake (formerly a Kango) for more than 400 days, I am proud to share with you that UpTake officially opens its Beta doors to everyone TODAY! Uptake is ”

a new vacation search site that has amassed the travel industry’s largest database of hotels and attractions (more than 400,000 in US) and analyzed more than 20 million online opinions from other travelers.

In the age that the “wisdom of crowds” are generated faster than ever, Uptake offers to collect and filter word-of-mouth from the web to make vacation planning easier. UpTake also got press at ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, SemanticWeb, SearchEngineLand, Les Explorers and the UpTake blog itself. It is only for United States for now. But Winser Zhao of SinoHotelReservation also wrote about us.
To describe the Uptake services using the geek’s vocabulary, it: uses a travel ontology and natural language analysis to extract meta-tags from the collective intelligence it has collected and returns unbiased, personalized recommendations based on travelers’ facts and feelings.” So how much do you Read the rest of this entry »

A groundswell of information is being shared and produced about the devastating Sichuan earthquake yesterday that hit south-west China near Chengdu, Sichuan. Coverage all over the place but check IfGogo.com, Shanghaiist, Danwei, GlobalVoices. If you are on Twitter, you can follow the people that account ChinaList follows and that’s a start at tapping into some of the people in China. Or you can use Summize to search Twitter for the term: 地震 or earthquake. People’s Daily coverage here and reports Premier Wen heading out to the affected region. CNN reports 3,000 dead, 900 buried in quake, according to Xinhua.

Other CNReviews coverage: China earthquake donation guide

Photo on Sina (h/t fuzheado)

IfGoGo also provided many photos on the Sichuan earthquake.

IfGoGo.com provided many images about the 7.8 Sichuan earthquake. Above image of “people in Sichuan (maybe) from Hainei.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Just read a nicely-written article with interesting statistics about China at The Independent (via Dan over at China Law Blog).

Though China’s market reforms and subsequent economic growth started 30 years ago, it has only been the recent decade where an appreciable amount of the masses are finally grasping just how profound it is. I say “grasping” because even so, the vast majority of them have yet to appreciate or truly understand just what China’s rise to global economic and political prominence will mean, burdened as they are–understandably–by their fears and ultimately their ignorance.

Here is a good excerpt (emphasis mine):

I am not sure we in the West fully grasp the magnitude of what is happening. Intellectually we can see it affecting us but emotionally it is hard to understand that we are moving towards a world where Western ideas, our ideas, will no longer hold sway. China has other ideas. Those will increasingly co-exist alongside ours in shaping global economic and political development….We will not find this comfortable. What we think will matter less and less. But we cannot do anything about it, and in any case, consider the alternative. Would we really want a China that was failing in economic terms, with all the misery that would cause? That would surely be far more dangerous and disruptive to the world than a continuation of China’s thrilling but terrifying success story. Read the rest of this entry »

I tend to give special days special names, like David Day for a certain day in January (when yours truly was “created” aka born), Honey Day (for St Valentine’s Day), and now, Mom Day and Dad Day. It’s a David Feng tradition — what more can I say? David Feng naming innovation… or something like that.

Onwards. This Mom Day special of our famous Mind the Gap series is here because — well, today’s Mom Day! Happy Mom Day first of all to my mom — a one and only mom who made my 26 years all that bit more special. In this special, I’d like to point out to some special characteristics about moms and Chinese culture. Read the rest of this entry »