Welcome to the new livefrombeijing.

Unlike my old blog (live-from-beijing.blogspot.com), this new site should be accessible all over mainland China and will hopefully remain that way. Plus, having my own domain opens up some cool possibilities for future site development, should I have the time to realize a few ideas I have brewing.

In the meantime, for now, this site should be functionally very similar to the old one. The primary difference (outside of the url change and accessability within mainland China), is the addition of pages in addition to pure blog posts. I’ve migrated the contents of two oft-updated posts (list of Chinese energy and environmental standards for vehicles and reports repository) to pages, and expect that over time I will be creating more.

Also, for those of you who subscribe, please note the new feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/livefrombeijing/feed.

It took a long time to update all the images and inner-blog links from blogspot to the new domain. I may have overlooked some, though, so if you are within mainland China and come across a missing image / broken link, I would appreciate it if you would let me know either in the comments or by e-mail: livefrombeijing at gmail dot com.

It will also take me some time to complete the full transition to using wordpress smoothly (not to mention some time to catch up on all the posts I have wanted to write over the past few weeks),  so I appreciate your continued patience!

Enjoy the new site, and please do get in touch with comments or questions.

Best,

Vance

Greetings,

I am doing some site maintenance (and have been really busy), so my posting will likely be light for the next little while.

For the record, this is not “maintenance” as related specifically to the massive information control currently occurring in China as a result of the protests / riots in Xinjiang. The maintenance I am doing is, however, related to the fact that blogspot (including this blog), has been blocked in China since mid-May. Especially given the events of the last two days, it seems unlikely that China will unblock blogspot for some time; therefore, I am in the process of setting up a new blog and migrating my posts.

With Twitter blocked again as of Sunday night, I was a little disappointed to see the BeijingAir feed tweet about “routine maintenance”:

A more appropriate tweet would be “Site is currently under routine harmonization. Please refer to the last available reading.”

Lastly, here is some recent news reading / placeholders for future commentary:

7/2 China Daily: Beijing air cleanest in 9 years
7/3 Time blog: Cleaner Skies in Beijing
7/4 Xinhua: Chinese Minister refutes doubts over air quality results during Olympics
7/6 CELB: Beijing Makes Straw Man of Paper Tiger

A couple of quick disclaimers regarding information on this blog:

1) The opinions I share on this blog are mine alone, and do not represent those of my past or current employer (who I have not named here).

2) The analysis I present on this blog has not been peer-reviewed (unless otherwise noted), and should generally be considered back-of-the-envelope data explorations intended to promote discussion, not rigorous scientific analysis. I will, however, cite original data sources and explain assumptions and reasoning as much as possible, in case others want to verify my analysis and/or take it further.

Please feel free to link to or cite information on this blog, but if you do I ask that you stay mindful of the above two points.

If you have any questions, please contact me at livefrombeijing at gmail dot com.