Back in Business!

I am pleased to announce that Ask the Chinese Guy is back in business! Though it won't be a Chinese Guy. A new colleague of mine has volunteered to take your questions. She is a Chinese American who has been to China and lived there for months at a time. She has generously offered to take the place of TCG.

She will be attributed by the pseudonym: Yang

Though she will be answering the majority of the questions, I will still do 100% of the posting, as a convenience to her.

So lets get things going again! Send your questions here!

Take note that this is a new email address, if you sent a question to the old TCG email and never received a response, please do not hesitate to resend it to this new address.

Comment Spam

Yeah, Im still here. I do like to check in periodically to do some housekeeping. Maybe I'll add a post again if I can think of one.

Comment spam has been a big problem Im noticing. There was so much of it that I just deleted all recent comments posted anonymously. If you posted a real comment as anon and it got deleted, I apologize.

Most spam comments start out looking legitimate saying something like "great post" or "wonderful blog" etc, then at the end it says something like "visit my webpage -> 'webpage'" and links to a site for penis enlargement pills or something. It's annoying, and filtering out spam by hand or doing moderation is much too time consuming. So an ID is now required to comment (Google, Open ID etc). In addition, CAPTCHA is now enabled. This should prevent flooding.

And FYI, I have no plan to delete this blog, but no real plan to revive it either (unless someone wants to take over).

Where to go from here?

My name is KaiWen and I am the current curator of this blog.

For some time I have been writing articles about China on this blog as a guest writer to supplement the Q and A content produced by the Chinese Guy.

As you may have read or not read some time ago, the actual Chinese Guy who created this blog is on an indefinite hiatus. More or less, he got tired of this blog and decided to move on in life. Therefore, he has given me admin control over this blog.

I didn't feel like I was qualified to answer questions so I thought I could continue this blog by posting some of my own China related content. However, recent comments on some of my posts have pointed out factual inconsistencies that I have overlooked or did not know. And they're right. I am by no means an expert on China, and I no longer believe I am qualified to write anything about China on this blog without doing extensive, time consuming research first, which isn't really fun or worth it for a blog that pays nothing.

So where do we go from here?

Well, hopefully I can find another "Chinese Guy" with good knowledge of China and Chinese culture who can answer questions like this blog was originally intended.

If you would like to volunteer for the position, shoot me an e-mail here.

As for me? I am not sure what role I am suited to play here. Maybe I'll just repost interesting content that I find elsewhere or write editorials on current events.

If you have any ideas I would welcome them.

And if you would be so kind, you could also visit my blog.

Hiatus

Dear readers.



People who are from Japan and or have lived in Japan may recognise this tune and what it signifies......

This blog is on hiatus for a unspecified amount of time, initially I had considered closing it and deleting it completely but blogger hides the delete button somewhere.

Closing it also is kind of bleak and permanent. And sometimes very infrequently I get the urge to simply splatter my thoughts all over a post to rant and rave for a moment.

But having read this from the Pinoy guy

I have not written for months and been really remiss in answering the questions that are piling up because

(1) I have been so busy with work and family and (2) I simply have not been in the mood to write lately. This blog, as you know, is a “moodly” – I write and answer questions when I’m in the mood. That’s why even my loyal readers have abandoned my blog because of the absence of new entries. I don’t blame them – I too would do the same (and in fact did over the last few months).

I've simply decided to take a Sabbatical from this blog for a multitude of reasons. This may well be permanent who knows what tomorrow will bring, but I've spent the last few days typing out responses to a few interesting questions to sort of draw a line over it. Other responses which do not appear here are answered by email.

If anybody wants to take over the reins or be an author here then email me and I'll get round to setting permissions when I get a moment.

Firstly I don't really feel in the mood to be doing this anymore. When presented with something else to do this takes a backseat a lot of the time.

Secondly I'm going adventuring for a bit, who knows when I'll be back, if ever...

So thats it for now.

May I recommend:

The Korean guy
Jocelyn
www.Chinasmack.com

Oh TCG, you're so typical...

at least thats what National Geographic says according to world statistics. A study by National Geographic says that the typical human is a right handed, 28 year old Han Chinese male who lives in or near the city, is literate and works in the services industry.

Did I just blow your mind?



Even so, that composite image does not represent humanity as a whole. It was made from over 7000 Chinese men. The reason it was only Chinese men is because there are more Chinese men than the men of any other single ethnic group. While no ethnic group makes up the majority of all humans, Chinese outnumber any other individual ethnic group. If you wanted to see what the average human would look like all ethnic groups considered, it would probably look like the cover of TIME magazine Fall 1993:

Ok, America ≠ The World, but I don't think you can find a better example as the US is definitely the worlds most diverse nation.

Two new authors

I finally got round to granting author access to Patrick Woo, one of my friends who flits between Beijing and Macau and always owes me beer.

Also Kevin B who is a long time reader and Sinophile who generally provides me with interesting links now and again I'm usually far too busy to actually post or too apathetic to do stuff with.


Hopefully this may alter the Marie Celeste type month July has been....

Or perhaps it might be a jumping the shark moment



But who knows?


Mwahhahhahahaaaa, fresh victims for my ever growing army of the undead

That's all folks

No the blog isn't going away as said I'm busy and set to get busier over the next few days so questions will be answered when I can have a moment and not catching up with my Zzzz's. Though I have had some really weird post lately which may be an exception to this busy state. As quite simply it was comedy gold and is TCG after too much drink stimulant vs a weirdo.

TCG is sort of away

This actually isn't a live post I pre-posted this sometime last week after vanishing off to a party for the weekend to celebrate various work things I have going on for the next month. After this month I have more work which goes on for a long time afterwards.

Therefore expect responses to take longer as obviously work which pays money is more important than this blog and running this blog the pay is obviously fairly shit.

I will answer your questions but probably only on Sundays and in one go therefore don't be impatient! I gotta make a living too you know!

Mean while I recommend you go bother the Korean guy instead for a while as my blogging will be significantly less prolific (May/June were very quiet months!) .

So really I'll check in from time to time..

Regards