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Hanging out with Weibo's most famous cretin

B Ge (B哥), or "Brother B", has 103636 followers on Weibo, China's Twitter. He posts silly videos of him goofing around, such as pretending to down a bottle of cooking oil on the Beijing subway, or blowing up a condom into a balloon in the supermarket. Today he posted his newest video – featuring, to my everlasting and unerasable embarrassment, yours truly.

A 2008 perspective of China that holds true in 2013

This is a clip from an interview I did with Chris Patten in Oxford back in 2008, shortly before the Olympics when I first came to live in Beijing. Rewatching it now, the two minute clip makes as much sense in context five years later as it did then. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Following on from Rana Mitter, here's another video interview I've drudged up from my archives, this time with none other than Chris Patten.

He describes his own first sight of China, in 1979, looking out from the northern territories of Hong Kong into Shenzhen – then nothing more than a "sleepy fishing village", now "Adam Smith out of Hieronymus Bosch".

Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University and author of some really excellent books, including A Bitter Revolution. Sweeping behind the digital sofa of my old blog, I found this video interview I did with him in Oxford in 2008. He talks about his first visit to China, to Guangzhou in the late 80s, back when foreigners were still a rarity. Here it is, with Mandarin subtitles to boot (but hosted on Youtube, so 要翻墙).