Logo for www.Chinesefilms.cn Last month, the Film Bureau of China launched www.chinesefilms.cn, its first English-language website dedicated to promoting domestically produced films to a world audience. The portal offers news, celebrity photos and even informational pages on the major studios in mainland China. From initial appearances, the site has a ways to go: a number of links are broken, and among the top search terms “Confucious” is spelled incorrectly. The look and fe

Memorial flowers left at Google's China headquarters (image source: The Shanghaist) On The China Beat, Ying Zhu and Bruce Robinson give a fascinating take on two major cultural controversies in China so far this year: the showdown between Google and the Chinese government, and the pulling of Avatar from Chinese theater chains. In their article, Zhu and Robinson identify the Chinese citizenry as an increasingly empowered force in shaping their society. They cite this to expla

What do this: and this: have in common? Apparently, they are both images of urban gentrification in China. The top image is from James Cameron’s Avatar, which recently set the opening-day box office record in China with 33 million yuan ($4.85 million US). The film is on track to take over the record for total gross of 460 million yuan ($67 million US) set just months ago by Roland Emmerich’s 2012, which itself had just beaten the 450 million yuan earned by Transformers 2: Th