Posts relating to China or the Chinese culture.
Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye of Chloé believes the mainland Chinese market is moving toward more understated luxury. I believe there’ll always be a mixture. The understated buyer is emerging probably because of saturation by more extrovert brands—and often, buyers want to get something different, rather than conform. And the top-end luxury brands have […]
Read More… from Chloé chief sees China moving to more understated luxury—or is it?
Volvo has announced that it will build a plant in China, and seeks approval for a second, in what it calls its second home market. It was inevitable, though for the long-term survival of the brand, it’s not a bad idea. Through Geely’s acquisition, it can potentially leapfrog other foreign car brands inside […]
Since New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are about the only two days I actually take off, I spent some time adding entries on Autocade, a site that doesn’t seem like “work” to me. It’s my hobby. The randomizer, which my friend Peter Jobes installed for me on the site’s home page, came […]
Last week, GM announced it would drop the Daewoo marque, as it has done through Europe, in its native Korea, in favour of Chevrolet. The company will also be renamed GM Korea, a name it once had nearly four decades ago. While most will think this makes sense, so GM can concentrate on […]
It’s 2011, which, by my calculations, is the centenary of China kicking out the corrupt Ching dynasty. It’s the one event that both Republicans and Communists can agree on as being positive. It’s why Dr Sun Yat-sen is such a uniting figure for all Chinese, as the father of the nation. I can’t […]
I found out a day after many netizens: Google is now forcing all YouTube account holders to merge their accounts with their Google ones. As part of my de-Googling, I won’t be following suit. Instead, I plan to stay logged out of YouTube: it makes very little difference to me. So I won’t […]
SAIC is doing a great job in tapping to the heritage of MG and the companies that have gone before. Hop over to the SAIC–MG site and you’ll see this image to tie in to the launch of the B-class MG 3 hatchback: The imagery tells a good deal of the story already: the […]
Read More… from MG taps into BMC’s small-car heritage to market the 3
Baidu Talk, which launched in September, has netted 1 million users already, according to PC World. Michael Kan reports that thanks to the service’s insistence that no aliases are used (registered users’ identities are verified with the People’s Republic’s government) ‘this has led to more “civil” discussions between users on Baidu Talk.’ It shows […]
Apart from sounding like a burger, the Mitsubishi Zinger—or, to give its full model name these days in Taiwan, the Super Zinger (not kidding)—is one of those oddball vehicles I come across when editing Autocade. It’s a minivan based on a truck chassis—in this case the first-generation Mitsubishi Challenger—and a pretty ugly one at that. […]
As I watched actress Liv Ullmann read Liu Xiaobo’s address, ‘I Have No Enemies’, on BBC World, I was quite moved. The address is what the Nobel Prize-winning author and intellectual delivered prior to his sentencing by a Red Chinese court for subversion. What is fascinating is the dignity with which the words […]
Read More… from Even as Liu Xiaobo gets a Nobel prize, Beijing can be smug