Your silence and ignorance have already become the price for your safety, become an important reason your existence is permitted. You have become the cost of maintaining the status quo in your republic, and for the sake of the great and kind mother, why not? If you can't see or hear anything, then you...
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It was the first time unadulterated music had ever plucked at my heartstrings like that. Tears came, and I quickly wiped them away, trying valiantly to keep my body from shaking from the trembles that accompany sobs, afraid that those sitting behind me might see. In the past, I had heard of people who...
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Since last year’s earthquake, the government has stubbornly refused to release the numbers of students killed. Ai Weiwei’s volunteer project, a group attempt to collect and release the number and names of the students who died, has recently gained some attention, on this blog and elsewhere, largely because of the resistance Ai has encountered...
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In the past few days, the Chinese government has been taking a bit of a beating in the international press for its response to the Swine Flu outbreak, which has been to quarantine anyone who has recently come from Mexico — regardless of whether or not they’re showing symptoms — and treat foreigners from...
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WARNING: This post contains some graphic images. Proceed at your own risk. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei keeps on trucking, collecting names and information of students who died in the May 12th earthquake one year ago, and but the censors moving along just the same, deleting posts as he puts them up over and over...
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Introduction Tomorrow is the ninetieth anniversary of the student protests-turned-riots in Beijing in 1919. These protests became a symbol for those struggling to strengthen China, and the name “May Fourth” became shorthand for a cultural movement that lasted over half a decade and gave birth to some of China’s finest writers, artists, and scholars....
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First of all, apologies for the recent lack of updates. It is possible this will continue. Your correspondent is currently rather sick, and also in the process of packing to move back to America while looking for jobs there teaching, if you can believe it, Chinese. Yesterday Evan Osnos mentioned in a post of...
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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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