More and more people worldwide are learning Chinese each year, and if the Chinese government has anything to do with it, they’ll be learning at Confucius Institutes. Confucius Institutes (孔子学院) are a Ministry of Education initiative; they are in essence Chinese language and culture schools set up in foreign countries, sometimes at universities, that...
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Slate ran an interesting piece yesterday about the increasing frequency with which Chinese people have, and use, English names. The author of the piece (Huan Hsu), a Chinese-American living in Shanghai, writes, “At my workplace, which is 90 percent mainland Chinese, just about everyone I interacted with had an English name, usually selected or...
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Ai Weiwei’s blog was recently updated with statistics from their investigation as of April 27th. There’s no point in translating the post fully, so we’ll just reproduce it below. The first column is the ranking of the schools, by number of estimated deaths. The second column is the name of the school in question...
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A good friend and sometimes-tipster points us to this blog post on a liberal website, quoting fairly recent Gallup polls that indicate China is more popular among Americans than Congressional Republicans. The post is apparently part of a larger series making fun of Congressional Republicans by pointing out unpopular things they are less popular...
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To begin with, I haven’t read all of the book (中国不高兴), or even most of it, so admittedly everything I say here ought to be taken with a grain of salt or three. Nor should this be mistaken for a review of the book or commentary on the book as a whole. Frankly, I...
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I'm not opposed to having a plan for your life, but making up a chart for it in Excel is terrifying. In life, you only get one trip to the end of the road , or only one chance up on the stage; I feel these all can rely on charts. However, getting...
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Two masked me took me (Zhao Xinhua), tied me arms, twisted my neck down to the ground, and kicked and punched me. Another man grabbed my hair and used it to slam my head to the ground, they beat me until I was screaming in pain. Later, they dragged and beat me two hundred...
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History has always been a subject with particular potency in China. Confucius used rituals and sage-king exemplars from a bygone age as models for proper behavior. Emperors traced their family lines back into mythology to justify their place at the center of the universe. Today, common people proudly tout China’s “five thousand years of...
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Zhang Xinqi, from Henan province, was a worker on the Olympic Forest Park. On July 2nd, 2008 I met...
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In modern China, no one can shut themselves in an ivory tower, there is nowhere that's a haven of peace. If, in life, you wish to get far away from this haze, aside from action, aside from seriously and earnestly fighting for change, creation, and construction, there's no other way.
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