China From the West

The New York Times Enrages Netizens, Part II

July 29, 2009
By C. Custer

You may have seen our recent post about how netizens at Anti-CNN have been up in arms about the misleading captions of recent New York Times web slideshows. Yesterday, they dove into the text of an actual article, pulling it apart for its’ so-called unfair coverage. Sentence by sentence, Anti-CNN questions the Times’s wording...
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Posted in China From the West | 12 Comments »

The New York Times Enrages Netizens

July 27, 2009
By C. Custer

The Anti-CNN folks are up in arms again, so much so that their webmaster has written a news story about it in English. This time, the target of their displeasure is the New York Times, who apparently edited photo captions for photos of the riots in Xinjiang. The photos came with captions from...
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Posted in China From the West, Current Events, History, International Relations, Politics | 85 Comments »

F***n G**g and the Hardest Thing About Studying China

July 25, 2009
By C. Custer

There is nowhere on earth we can learn about or read about without bias, but even given the assumption that bias exists everywhere, China might be the worst country in the world to attempt to study if you're trying to assess the veracity of anything remotely controversial.
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Posted in China From the West, Culture | 31 Comments »

Crappy China Travel Advice

June 16, 2009
By C. Custer

From time to time, ChinaGeeks gets requests from readers or whoever that we link a blog post of theirs. Generally, we do check out these links, although we don’t often end up linking them. Today, we will be linking one, although I fear it’s not the kind of endorsement the woman who emailed us...
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Posted in China From the West | 18 Comments »

Not Everything is About Democracy

June 6, 2009
By C. Custer
Not Everything is About Democracy

With the anniversary of June 4th now passed, relatively without incident, I was hoping to move on to other topics, but I came across this op-ed piece in the New York Times and, well, here we are. In it, Nicholas Kristof (the Times’s Beijing Bureau Chief in 1989) recounts his experiences in Beijing on...
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Posted in China From the West, Opinions | 25 Comments »

I Think You Forgot to Mention Tiananmen…

May 23, 2009
By C. Custer
I Think You Forgot to Mention Tiananmen…

I have always considered it rather unfortunate that the one part of Chinese history most Americans know something about — the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 — happens to be a part that many Chinese know little about. Granted, American knowledge doesn’t tend run very deep, people just know that students were killed, and...
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Posted in China From the West, Opinions | 27 Comments »

The Economist: Chinese Economic Model Dead

May 10, 2009
By Michele Scrimenti

From the Economist's May 2nd blog post: “Do recent events and the extraordinary growth of China prove quasi-capitalism with lots of government manipulation work ?” Given the political bent of this magazine, it is no surprise that the blog writer answers with a resounding “No.” Looking...
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Posted in China From the West, Current Events | 12 Comments »

Swine Flu and Why China Can't Win in the West

May 6, 2009
By C. Custer
Swine Flu and Why China Can't Win in the West

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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Posted in China From the West, Current Events | 59 Comments »

Chinese People and English Names

April 28, 2009
By C. Custer

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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Posted in China From the West, Culture, Opinions | 8 Comments »

Blaming the Government For Everything

April 8, 2009
By C. Custer

McClatchy has an interesting piece up about the increasing popularity of tattoos in China in recent years (h/t to Danwei). It’s a pretty interesting read, and apparently lots of Chinese people are getting tattoos in foreign languages, so hopefully in a few years we can look forward to seeing English tattoos that make as...
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Posted in China From the West, Culture, Opinions | 2 Comments »