The Return of Rolling Stone China! Well, Kind of...

After the glorious debut and near-immediate dissappearance of Rolling Stone China in March, the magazine is back - but with a different name, Yin Xiang Shi Jie (音像世界), or Audio World, an already existant but foundering music magazine resurected as a shell for Rolling Stone. So reports Lawrence Li in the HK Standard. Gee, I'm betting the folks in San Francisco are really psyched about this branding/licensing fiasco.

The renamed magazine will continue re-publishing some Rolling Stones articles in
Chinese, blending them with original articles on homegrown music. [Editor in chief] Hao says there is no mandatory requirement on the ratio of translated and original articles.

Quick note about the author: Lawrence Li is a music critic in Shenzhen who runs a blog devoted to avant-garde music, noise, and sound art. His tastes are not exactly mainstream, and that comes out in his criticisms of the first issue.

Also worth considering: while Rolling Stone China got slammed with the Beijing censorship hammer, there are other major western magazine brands with presence in China: Men's Journal, I think, and several women's fashion magazines are on newstands everywhere. So it can be done, They're just not letting Rolling Stone do it.