Bike Battle Hits Beijing Streets

(Featured image) After last year’s car-hailing wars, in which Didi Chuxing comprehensively defeated American rival Uber, the latest battle for Beijing’s streets is being fought by the bike-sharing companies. In the yellow corner, local start-up Ofo currently has the most cycles on the street, but Mobike, its rival in orange, boasts a smart app which lets you find nearby bikes and has an English interface. Bluegogo is the plucky underdog. While they struggle for supremacy there are plenty of bargains for the user, but there are also rumors of dirty tricks, with rivals’ bikes being vandalized or dumped in canals. Still, whichever one you use, it’s a handy and healthy way to get home from the subway station.

Cook for Hope

Beijing’s favorite charity cook-off returns on April 27, as Cook For Hope takes place at the Green T House. Money raised will go toward vital heart surgery for nine-month-old baby Han, and one of the judges is our very own Pauline van Hasselt, who’s a trained chef as well as an intrepid reporter for beijingkids! Check our website for information about tickets and other ways you can get involved.

We Don’t Hate Peppa Pig, Beijing Insists

Confusion reigns over rumored controls on the publication in China of foreign picture books for children. In March South China Morning Post reported publishers as saying they had been told to reduce the number of translated books they published, although the order was not made public. Perhaps officals were stung by the international furor that followed, because denials quickly followed. Two articles in Global Times, often used as a mouthpiece for government policy, claimed the rumors had been invented by foreign media to make China look bad. However, it’s certainly true that Taobao has banned the sale of imported books, DVDs, and video games without permits. So if your little ones are addicted to Peppa Pig, it might be a good idea to stock up now.

Pinterest Pinned by the Great Firewall of China

Our eyes have been turned to many WeChat moments and chat flurries of outrage after Pinterest, the never-ending well of creativity, hits the dust in the recent blocking tirade in China. We don’t know why exactly Pinterest has been blocked, since it’s been an unscathed source of inspiration for many, including us here at beijingkids. But our guess is that it has to do with Pinterest’s recent acquisition of Jelly Industries, a search-engine company. Jelly was co-founded by Biz Stone, who happened to also co-found Twitter and Medium. These platforms are also blocked in a sort of Chinese government boycott against Biz Stone’s belief that Chinese laws are “antithetical to [Twitter’s] whole way of doing things.”

Babytree and Fisher-Price to Create Early Learning Platform

Beijing-based parenting website Babytree has signed a deal with American toymaking giants Mattel, to develop an early childhood online learning platform. Babytree was founded ten years ago by a former Google executive, and has become known as “the Facebook for Chinese parents,” with over nine million registered users. They will team up with the Fisher-Price brand, which produces toys including “Thomas and Friends,” to create a platform which “will host a wealth of resources for families, including child development assessment tools and customized parenting content and development curriculum, to enable many parenting styles and address the unique development paths of their child.”

Harmony and Steve
by Jin Chan Yum Wai

Photos: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, US China News, and Courtesy of Weber Shandwick, Cook for Hope, and Vanessa Jencks

 

This is an updated version of the article that originally appeared on p. 6 of beijingkids April Issue.

Download the digital copy here.

Pinterest, the never-ending well of creativity, is now blocked in China.

Our eyes have been turned to many WeChat moments and chat flurries of outrage. Why would China block such an innocuous platform?

We’re just as angry as all the rest of moms (“And teachers!!” a few readers have pointed out), since the team at beijingkids also uses Pinterest to come up with cover ideas, layouts, and projects to try and review for readers.

We don’t know why exactly Pinterest has been blocked, since it’s been an unscathed source of inspiration, but our guess is that it has to do with Pinterest’s recent acquisition of Jelly Industries, a search-engine company. Jelly was co-founded by Biz Stone, which happened to also co-found Twitter and Medium. These platforms are also blocked in a sort of Chinese government boycott against Biz Stone’s belief that Chinese laws are “antithetical to [Twitter’s] whole way of doing things.”

The other possibility is that China is cracking down on foreign imports in ideology in strange ways. We don’t know why Pinterest would have been blocked to keep Western thought out, since from our knowledge, there weren’t many Chinese users of Pinterest.

But China’s recent blocking tirade is on full blast at the moment, with poor Peppa Pig books, among other foreign-published books for children, and South Korean group trips now also banned.

More stories by this author here.
Email: vanessajencks@truerun.com
Twitter: @vanessa_jencks
WeChat: vanessajencks

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Some of the best ideas for our iconic cover photos have come from Pinterest.

Pinterest isn’t our only source of inspiration, but it does play an important role in helping us to process our creative juices and come up with some really cool ideas for cover photos, articles, and magazine layouts.

Sign up is very easy and only requires an email address. Access to great ideas can start from your hand with their mobile app, and best of all, it’s not blocked by the Great Firewall. How cool is that?

We’ve set up a few boards for our readers that we think will be helpful.

On polluted or flooded or crazy weather weekend days, this board has plenty of ideas to help your kids stay occupied.

Teachers often use Pinterest to find great classroom ideas, and parents who want to learn more about education should use it, too.

Are you already pinning? Connect with us so we can draw inspiration from one another!

Photos: Screen Shot

Am obsessed with Pinterest, I can’t remember how my life existed without it. The best part about Pinterest is that it isn’t blocked in China, there is a god! Well, recently Pinterest released the trends we should expect to see in 2016 via Pinterest 100 for 2016.  The parenting pins are a mix of old school fun and tech savvy ideas to try out. Here’s a short list:

For those high pollution winter days

Board games are making a comeback

Screen Free travel activities for long and short trips

How to have the talk about your child’s emotions

Sensory play recipes to try out

Valuable screen time by having kids learn how to code 

Gender neutral colors for decorating that space

Sourced from Netmums  

Photos: www.fullissue.com, thedailyfandom.com, makecreatedo.com, lemonlimeadventures.com, airskull.com, jessicashepard.com & associerge.com

Heads up: beijingkids is now on Pinterest, the social media site that allows you to organize pictures into themed "boards" or collections. We scoured our archives and brought together our greatest hits for family-friendly dining, day trips, weekend getaways, and more in a visually-appealing format.

Recently, Pinterest also introduced a Foursquare-powered map function that allows you to visualize the physical location of all the pins on a board. For example, readers can see the placement of each entry on our board for kid-friendly restaurants in Beijing.

In addition to pinning relevant content from others and our own website, we’ll be putting up seasonal boards for things like unique Christmas gifts with a Beijing dimension.

Start following us at www.pinterest.com/beijingkids.com and let us know if there’s a board you’d like to see.