Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

Ryan announces a group writing project over at Lost Laowai, aimed at the Chinese Blogosphere. The topic?

If I knew then what I knew now.

What do you know now that you wish you knew before you arrived in China? Write a post, and contribute to what will likely be a great guide for Laowai-to-be coming to China.

Lost Laowai now has its own official group on Facebook. If you’re a member of the popular social networking site, be sure to join the group of fellow lost laowai!

Come see who else is a member, put faces to names around the China blogsphere (yikes!), ask questions if you’re new to China, or post complaints if you’re not.

Hey all - Lost Laowai has received a major facelift to create a more seamless flow between the main site and the blog, as well as to add additional Web 2.0 functionality. I sure would appreciate if you'd go check it out and let me know what you think.

Tom, of The Library Project, sits down with Lost Laowai and gives us the skinny on this excellent cause helping bring books, and change, to impoverished areas of China.

In my opinion, writing Chinese words with the Latin character set and neglecting tone marks is the equivalent of writing English words with dots in place of the vowels. Yes, it’s possible to guess the missing information from context, but it’s not a very complete writing system.

Living in China brings with it a number of occasions where most can do nothing but scratch their heads and say “WTF?” However, largely by the help of the English-language China blogsphere, we’ve started to create a dictionary that can assist in putting words to the weird, definitions to the disarray and captions to the confusing.

The LICtionary, or Life In China Dictionary, contains terms us expats have created to put form to the fiction that is life in China.

Beijing expat Jeremiah runs through a few of the things he loves about Beijing. A good list that reminds us that despite what the microscope wielders are reporting about air quality and traffic - the city is still pretty damn cool.

What's the perfect way to show her "I love you"?

Apparently, this Chinese guy thinks the path to true love includes being knocked out with chloroform, and being brought back to the love nest.

During my first month in Fuqing, a Chinese colleague had given me a handwriting textbook written for Chinese kindergartners, and a grid-lined notepad, specifically designed for writing characters. At the time, I was diligent in my Chinese studies, but had decided to focus my studying around pinyin (Chinese Romanization) rather than learning to write the characters.