Happy Year of the Tiger (虎年) to all our readers!

Bye bye 2009, welcome 2010.  The start of a new decade is also the beginning of this website. From today we will be covering for our readers the latest technology-related developments from China.

For an auspicious start, we thought we would light some firecrackers. Well, we didn’t actually light real firecrackers; but we did the next best thing: paste a video of massively exploding firecrackers on this page.

Besides of directly visiting us at technologicalchina.com, you can also follow us on twitter and on our facebook fan page.

Happy new year to everybody!

As logo for our website we chose the Chinese character ji (技). Obviously we didn’t just randomly pick any character. When not associated with another character, ji means skill or ability. Words in modern Chinese being made with two characters, it is used to form, among others, the words technology-jishu (技术), science and technology-keji (科技) and skill-jiqiao (技巧).

Thus, this particular Chinese character seemed ideal to represent what we are doing here at technological China, namely documenting China’s use of technology.

How to write Chinese names with the help of the roman alphabet? Whoever writes about China in a Western language faces this problem. Fortunately linguists have long looked at it and developed several types of romanisation for Chinese characters.

Pinyin (拼音) is the official romanisation method in the People’s Republic of China and therefore by far the most widespread. It is the method we use at technological China.

When we mention Chinese names in our articles, we write them in Pinyin with the Chinese characters in brackets, e.g. Shanghai (上海). If the same word appears more than once in the same article, we will only add the Chinese characters to the first instance. Exceptions are Chinese brands whose English name is different from the Pinyin of their Chinese name, e.g. Lenovo (联想, pinyin: Lianxiang).

We leave out the accents, which are important; but would be to confusing for our purpose.

The Chinese pronunciation of a word is not always straightforward from its Pinyin. Learning how to write and pronounce Pinyin is usually the first step in learning Chinese.

More about Pinyin: pinyin.info; wikipedia.

Coming soon…