Multimedia: The Old School

February 2, 2009 | Category: China | 3 Comments

As a multimedia reporter, I admit I am occasionally given to bouts of smugness. I may get no respect from the grizzled guardians of old journalism, I tell myself in these moments, but I am the vanguard, the future—-the intrepid journalistic do-it-all wading into the torrent of 21st century technology to bring the world a new form of storytelling.

Or not, as it turns out.

This past Saturday was the last official day of China’s Spring Festival vacation. To mark the occasion, I went to Ditan Park in the northeast corner of old Beijing to catch the last day of the Spring Festival Temple Fair. I went with the vague hope of catching a Beijing Opera performance, which my neighbor told me was available this year. Instead, after twenty minutes jostling my way through the crowds, hands held boxer-like in front of my face to protect myself from the inflatable animals people were wielding like spears, I ran into the man pictured above, whose name (according the placard in the picture) is Chen Qihuan and whom I now humbly respect as a professional forebear.

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Tags: Art, beijing, Multimedia, performance, Spring Festival, traditional culture

24 hours on a Chinese train, in pictures

January 27, 2009 | Category: China, Multimedia, Travel | Leave a Comment

Managed to get this little slide show up on the GlobalPost site just in time for Chinese New Year and the inevitable train scandal mayhem. Significantly, the photos come from a trip I took to Chengdu in December, on a train filled with people who’d decided to head home a month earlier than usual. There turned out to be two major reasons: 1) to avoid getting caught up in the aforementioned mayhem; and/or 2) to avoid getting swept out to sea in the financial crisis.

The fact that the global economy’s recent faceplant has forced hordes Chinese people to head home early isn’t news, but I think (or hope, at least) the photos shed some additional light on the story. As always, I invite your feedback. (Check out the full-sized version here and higher resolution versions of the photos here)

New Gig: Global Post

January 19, 2009 | Category: China | 3 Comments

It’s been a long time since I posted anything here and a big reason is a new job I’ve taken as the China multimedia correspondent for Global Post. For those who don’t know about it (and I imagine that’s most of you), GP is a new online news venture founded by Charlie Sennot, ex of the Boston Globe, and Phil Balboni, a journalism business whiz who made his name with New England Cable News. The idea is fill the gaping hole left with the closing of foreign news bureaus over the past few years. You can read more about it here and here.

My first report for them is a video on how people in Beijing see the United States in light of Barack Obama’s election victory, part of a series called “For Which It Stands” outlining the international challenges Obama will face once he takes the oath. Have a gander and let me know what you think:

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Tags: beijing, globalpost, obama, Video

Friend’s refrigerator, 2 days before Thanksgiving…[UPDATED]

November 25, 2008 | Category: Food | 3 Comments

Behold:

and photos from the actual meal here and here

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Tags: Food, indulgence, refrigerator, thanksgiving, turkey

Photos of Art: Caochangdi/草场地

November 21, 2008 | Category: China, Photography | 1 Comment

Just returned from a very mixed attempt at beach vacationing (Thailand, about which more later) and have now finally gotten around to posting some long overdue photos. This set is from a trip my girlfriend and I took a couple months ago to Caochangdi, the village outside Beijing commandeered by Chinese uber-artist Ai Weiwei as a supposed alternativre to the Soho-ification of the 798 Art Zone, née Factory 798. The village’s name (草场地, literally “Grass Field”) suggests a rusticity and Woodstocky spontaneity I’m not sure it has, but…well, see for yourself.

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Tags: beijing, photos, village

Obama + San Francisco = Bongorific

November 7, 2008 | Category: Video | 3 Comments

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Tags: 2008, election, obama, politics, san francisco

Video: Olympics Over

August 26, 2008 | Category: China, Video | 6 Comments

As this video suggests, my tenure as a hired gun on the Wall Street Journal’s Olympics video team is essentially over. Three weeks lugging a camera around Beijing by day, staring dry-eyed and drooling at a computer by night…If only I were a full employee, I’d have the health insurance to pay the team of chiropractors and opthamologists I’m going to need to turn me back into a functioning human being after I pack up my gear and drag it back home.

Having said that, the pain had its pay-offs: We managed to produce 27 videos, more by far than any other US newspaper. And I now have a much clearer sense of what a strange dance these American titans of print are doing with multimedia. I’ll try to write more on that score after I’ve had a chance to recover…

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Tags: beijing, Food, Fuwa, Olympics, WSJ

Video: The Book on China’s Fashion Police

August 20, 2008 | Category: China, Video | 3 Comments

Another video done in cahoots with Loretta from the Wall Street Journal. This one covers a book, Civilized Etiquette (文明礼仪), supposedly distributed to all Beijing residents four years ago as part of an effort to keep the city from embarassing itself in front of foreign guests during the Olympics. The book got a lot of play, including on the WSJ website, in the pre-Olympics coverage.

One part of the book that didn’t get much coverage was the fashion chapter. We thought it was a bit dubious for a government led by men in ill-fitting suits and clunky gold wire-frame glasses to be telling others how to dress, so we decided to do a story on it. Enjoy.

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Tags: beijing, etiquette, fashion, Video, WSJ

Video: China’s “Angry” Youth

August 12, 2008 | Category: China, 荒诞, Video | 2 Comments

I helped Loretta Chao from the Wall Street Journal produce this video on a kid from Henan she saw filming a protest on Tian’anmen Square yesterday. A fantastic, fascinating character. High on China like he’d injected some sort of narcotized liquid patriotism. Wish I could have used more of him, but Internet attention span research tells us to keep everything to under four minutes. Alas.

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Tags: fenqing, nationalism, WSJ

Park Record Beijing Bureau: Why Utahns Should Care About the Beijing Olympics

August 5, 2008 | Category: China | Leave a Comment

With the Olympics about to dawn over Beijing’s polluted skyline, the free time I usually devote to writing this blog is about to evaporate. In lieu of fresh blog posts, I’ve secured permission to instead republish the semi-regular Olympics column I’m writing for my hometown newspaper, the Park Record, in Park City, Utah. I’m willing to admit these may hold little interest for anyone not from Utah, except maybe some lonely grad student somewhere studying the localization of international news. So, for you, Mr. Grad Student…

From the Beijing Bureau: A tale of two Olympic cities
Park Record, 2008.07.22

This was fortitude of historical proportions. On September 11, 2001, just as people in northern Utah had started decorating their cities in earnest for the Winter Olympics, a global party more than a decade in the making, two planes veered murderously off course 2000 miles to the east. The story from there hardly bears repeating: tens of thousands killed, a nation plunged into morning and, months later, an Olympics held despite it all. For years, it seemed the 2002 Winter Games would go down in history as the only Olympic gathering to take place so fast on the heels of a national disaster.

No longer.

On May 12th this year, with Beijing entering the feverish final stages of preparation for China’s first Olympics, a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck roughly a thousand miles away, in rural Sichuan Province. Seventy thousand were killed, the nation was plunged into mourning. And next month, yes, the Beijing Games will go ahead despite it all.

On the surface, Beijing 2008 has so little in common with Salt Lake City 2002 it seems ludicrous to even begin to compare them. The 100-meter dash versus the downhill. The Forbidden City versus the Mormon Temple. Five hundred thousand volunteers for one versus 22,000 for the other. The two Olympics feel about as comparable as the foods for which each city is best known: Roast Duck, meet Jell-O Salad. But look a little harder and striking parallels begin to emerge——parallels that suggest Utahns are in better position than most to understand what may be going through the minds of people in Beijing as their big day approaches.
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About the Author

Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.