The Plastics News China Blog is finally live!

From the previous posts, you can tell that we've been preparing for this blog for quite a while. The most notable feature of this blog lies in the bilingual, bicultural approach.

If you don't know this already, all the news content on the Plastics News China sites is written in English and then translated into Chinese. This publishing model has its limits in terms of the writing style and cultural background specific to the language. Idioms get lost in translation. For issues important to the different cultures, writers sometimes struggle with dissimilar, even conflicting, perspectives. Take Mattel's toy recalls as an example. Western readers were curious about the reality of outsourcing and manufacturing in China; while Chinese readers hoped to know how the incidents were going to affect China's international reputation and export business.

Therefore, I'm writing directly in Chinese for the Chinese version of the China blog, tapping into the country's culture, literature and business background. This English version of the China blog doesn't mirror the Chinese version. Rather, it picks up China-related topics that are of special interest to Western readers and offers analysis from the Western point of view. If you are bilingual, that's even better. You'll probably be able to catch both sides of one story.

Make yourself at home here, and do share your opinions using the comment feature.

Check back tomorrow for a post on an ongoing lawsuit between Battenfeld Extrusionstechnik and Hong Kong-based Cosmos Machinery Co. Ltd.