Recently, the Chinese internet has been abuzz with the term yakexi . According to a post on Baidu’s Baike, yakexi is the Uyghur word for good. The word has been in general use as a brand name for some time now, but it took on new meaning at this year’s Spring Festival Gala, where...
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Thanks to twitterer niuB for pointing us in the direction of this excellent piece in Foreign Policy on myths and truths about Tibet, and the strange collective nostalgia many Westerners seem to have for a place they’ve never been and a people they’ve never been among. The entire article is worth a read, but...
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Twitter has been a boon for the Chinese dissident community. It is, in essence, an open forum outside the reach of GFW censorship. It is a place where Tan Zuoren’s sentence can be spread through an entire community within a couple minutes of it being handed down, a place where Ai Weiwei can respond...
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If you live in China, all you have to do is step onto the street to experience what chunyun, the rush of Chinese people on all forms of transportation to get home for Spring Festival, is all about. And while the holiday has already started this year, if you don’t live in the South,...
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Another Spring Festival is here. We here at ChinaGeeks want to wish you a happy year of the Tiger, and a fun (and safe!) holiday! If you want to know more about what this whole Spring Fesitval thing is about, check out our translation of the story of spring festival from last year! Again,...
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I apologize for stepping on Max R.’s most recent translation, which is here and which everyone should read. But I would be remiss if I didn’t point you in the direction of this post on Youku Buzz, and this machinima film, called War of Internet Addiction. That link goes to Youku, but viewers outside...
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As an American who speaks Chinese and a high school Chinese teacher, it was with some interest that I read the NYT’s most recent Room For Debate blog entry. With the caveat that, if my experience when I was asked to write something for RfD was any indication, the editors are looking from specific...
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Note: You can follow up to the minute tweets on Tan Zuoren’s sentencing here, but most of them are in Chinese. Tan Zuoren, like Ai Weiwei, was conducting a citizen’s investigation into the deaths of students in the Sichuan earthquake last year. On March 28th, he...
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In lieu of posting anything original, today I point you in the direction of Hark, A Vagrant!, indisputably the best history-based webcomic on the interwebs. It is almost always funny, and although Kate Beaton rarely writes comics on Chinese history, her comic on Wu Zetian is pretty great: Yes, in internet years, this borders...
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The constitution of the People’s Republic of China states that Chinese citizens have “have the duty as well as the right to receive education have the freedom to engage in scientific research, literary and artistic creation and other cultural pursuits.” Yet anyone who has set foot in a Chinese classroom —...
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