Since the BBC Chinese service has ended broadcasting (and also, I understand VoA), is there anything that can replace their daily 20 minute podcasts on current affairs?

Preferably something with news that isn't censored...

Cheers

was this the BBC news podcast in Mandarin Chinese ? I subscribed to that one for a short while before I became so annoyed with their podcasts that I unsubscribed. One of the hostesses would constantly switch between a northern way of pronouncing words and the southern way of pronouncing them. So for some words she would say 政府 as zheng4 fu3, and then a few seconds later she would say zeng4fu3. Annoying.
Good job cutting them out, BBC !!

That said, I really like BBC Persian

( I actually like the southern accent, and the northern one, but I don't like it when people constantly switch back and forth within a single conversation. )

->Here's an article about their decision(Podcast + Text):

http://www.chinese.rfi.fr/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD/20110309-%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E4%B9%8B%E9%9F%B3%E5%92%8Cbbc%E5%8F%96%E6%B6%88%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E5%B9%BF%E6%92%AD%E7%9A%84%E4%BA%89%E8%AE%BA

And this a nice French-Chinese Online Broadcast:

http://www.rfi.fr/communcn/player/player.asp?Player=Win&Stream=http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/rfi/all/rfichinois.mp3&iframe=http://www.rfi.fr:80/statiques/playerAudioPageDescDefaut.asp&video=24%E5%B0%8F%E6%97%B6%E6%94%B6%E5%90%AC&s=undefined&s2=&xtpage=undefined&xt_multc=undefined

Hopefully the links will work...

Deutsche Welle has its 德国之声中文播客.

I preferred the BBC podcasts though. Gutted that they've stopped.

Thanks for the suggestions! It turns out RFI has a load of podcasts.

Still missing the BBC style. I'm not sure if it was due to their professionalism, or just because it was similar in style to news here otherwise. The last BBC podcast was particularly sad. It also included snippets of some historical recordings (eg, on movements of the Japanese army from the second world war), so is well worth listening to!

Can the podcasts above be downloaded, or do they just stream? I've been looking for some decent listening material lately; I've realized that, even though I live in China and come in daily contact with Chinese (though not enough as a full-time English teacher), I need to do more listening to regular, idiomatic Chinese in larger chunks than the short conversations I have with my colleagues and others, and more relevant than the 三国演义动画片 I occasionally watch. Since one of my best opportunities is while I'm on my bike, I'd like something I could pop onto my mp3 player.

And on the same topic, anyone have any decent audiobooks to recommend? Modern, relevant, idiomatic, and not too challenging are the primary requirements, with 'interesting' being a distant fifth. I'll emphasize 'not too challenging' because pushing myself is all well and good, but if I can't understand what I'm listening to at a certain level than it's just white noise. I do some reading that fills the requirements above, but reading and listening are different activities that train different skills, and you can't read a book on a bike (at least I can't, not if I want to stay out of the hospital for extended periods of time)...

Deutsche Welle can be downloaded, but it is blocked in China. If you subscribe it on itunes you should get the podcasts though. Another method is using the site www.podcast.de.

Here are the links:

http://www.podcast.de/podcast/15648/Deutsche_Welle_-_全球环保创意__德国之声#

http://www.podcast.de/podcast/5750/德国之声中文广播

http://www.podcast.de/podcast/14874/Deutsche_Welle_-_今日访谈_Interview_des_Tages

@FatDragon This is the best place I've found for audio books.

http://www.tingbook.com/

It has stuff for young kids through to adults and a lot of them have transcripts in case you get stuck

Absolutely awesome!
Apple Daily is also very very good:
http://tw.nextmedia.com

Wow tingbook.com is a great resource! Thanks for sharing!

I second Thomas' observation - I browsed through a bunch of sites that came up for 有声小说 searches on Google and Baidu, and they were all total cluster-you-know-whats. Chinese web design has yet to catch up with Western methods, and combine the unbroken walls of text (hint to Chinese web designers - blank space is totally free and wastes nothing online) with the fact that the text is in Chinese, the fact that most of them require malware-bloated proprietary programs for downloading and/or listening, and the fact that most of the books are uselessly poor recordings, and you get a bunch of sites that make me cringe and curse. Tingbook's still a bit overwhelming, but its layout is less crowded and it gets you where you need to go with minimal hassle.

re: meihui - I'll have to check out the Deutsche Welle casts sometime soon - are they world news, German news, Chinese news? I'll have to say, if they're German news, I'm not 100% sure I want to hear it - I have a high regard for Germany, but when Angela Merkel declared German multiculturalism a failure and suggested the country start finding ways to clear out some of the foreigners, I wasn't sure I wanted to hear any more...

@FatDragon
You caught me. I am not a regular listener of the Deutsche Welle podcast. ;-) But I just checked the link of 德国之声中文广播. For every episode there is a short summary in Chinese, so you can see what the main topics are. In the last topic they had some news about Libya, Sarkozy at the summit in Nanjing, Westerwelle visiting China, the national defence white paper of China, protests in Yunnan against the construction of a dam, something about Liu Xiaobo. So, there are German news, but the main focus is international and Chinese news. And Chinese news that are not readily available in China itself...

Hm, about NHK World Chinese? Maybe you prefer Japanese news over German? ;-)
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/chinese/top/index.html

"I have a high regard for Germany, but when Angela Merkel declared German multiculturalism a failure and suggested the country start finding ways to clear out some of the foreigners, I wasn't sure I wanted to hear any more..."

If you're not a German then I send my respects to you! You are very well informed and Angela Merkel "Angie" will apparently get kicked from her cancellors seat! That's for sure!

@FatDragon I used to watch Deutche Welle in English years ago and never detected any particularly German slant to the politics. Who knows, maybe they've changed, but I would give them a chance.

@Phoboss

I definitely second http://tw.nextmedia.com. Every since @ximeng recommended it on the "Taiwanese reading resources" thread, I've been watching the headline videos every day and it's made a huge difference for me.

So far in the last couple of days I've been able to join conversations about radioactive dust arriving in Taiwan (negligible by the way), rock concerts in Kenting, and a professor/student love scandal.

@Byzanti, did you hear the short message on the BBC Chinese podcast feed recently? It seems they are planning a new podcast. Hopefully it'll be similar in style to the old one.

I did... It was on April 1st so I had high expectations when I saw it :p.

It looks like there might be. Is it usual to refer to a podcast as a blog (they do seem to refer to the current series as a blog at the start of that message)? If so we're probably in luck! Hope it's a bit longer than the French and German newscasts.

My listening still isn't that great and the words for blog (博客）and podcast (播客）are kind of similar... I checked with my wife that I'd understood the message properly, that there would be a new podcast soon, and she said yes.

Ah. I didn't know there was an actual word for podcast... I got used to hearing the English “podcas" used.

Makes sense now - thanks!

According to this webpage http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/trad/services/2009/09/000000_china_focus_podcast.shtml , the new podcast will be available starting 11 April.