Tag: dageda

  • How do you say mobile phone in Chinese?

    Why is a mobile phone in China known as a shouji (手机, roughly, “handset”)? At least in the 1990s, some people knew the rare machine as a dageda (大哥大). I’ve been reading Jack Linchuan Qiu’s new book, Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (MIT Press, 2009), and he offers…