Tania in China

Television

I am sure you all have been dying to know: what have you been watching on television in China? There actually are a suprising number of English language channels, but I am sure that this has something to do with staying at a Western-style hotel. We get CNN Asia, CNBC (almost exclusively financial news), BBC News, ESPN, MTV, and a Fashion Channel that is amost all silly models and "beautiful people" being vain. We also get HBO Asia and Cinemax Asia - all the movies have Chinese subtitles, and are rather old by our standards. The big release of the month on HBO is "Meet the Fokkers". The channels I have been watching most include Discovery - they show a lot of travel and animal shows, as well as a few episodes of Mythbusters and The Most Dangerous Catch - and Star World, a Rupert Murdock network that runs year or two old American series. Mostly sitcoms, but I caught an episode of JAG recently. The last channel is ABC - but not the one you think - it is the Australian Broadcast Network. They run strictly Australian series, and I caught an interesting episode of a hospital drama a few nights ago.

They also have one French channel, a German channel, and I think a couple Japanese channels. The other 20 or so channels are in Chinese. I find it interesting that even the Chinese channels have Chinese subtitles - I think that may be because of all the different dialects in China - they all pronounce words completely differently, but can all read the same Chinese characters.

A funny sidenote: I caught a bit of an NFL game - Colts vs. Tennessee (I didn't know Tenessee had a professional team! When did that happen?) - on a Chinese channel. It was really interesting to see a football game being commentated in Chinese!

posted by Tania @ 8:02 PM