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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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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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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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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Twenty years ago today, April 15th, Hu Yaobang died, and in response, China exploded. Hu Yaobang was a CCP leader, and the General Secretary of the Party from 1980 until 1987, when he was forced out by socialist hard-liners for advocating bourgeois liberalization. He was forced to write a self-criticism, and when he died...
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Both China and the US have, in their ways, been dancing around environmental issues for years. China, a “developing” nation, played that card, while America played the “War on Terror” card. But the regime change in America, as well as increased recognition on the part of Chinese leaders that environmental issues could also threaten...
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Recently, we wrote a piece about how people attempting to collect names and information about students who died in the Wenchuan earthquake are meeting some resistance from police and officials. In the past few days, Ai Weiwei’s project has seen even more harassment. Yesterday, he posted a timeline of official messages from the last...
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If you aren’t aware already, the Chinese government recently announced “a blueprint for health-care over the next decade”. The reforms are aimed at making healthcare more available and affordable. The ultimate goal: “By 2020, the world’s most populous country will have a basic health-care system that can provide “safe, effective, convenient and affordable” health...
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Recently, we translated an editorial piece by Hu Yong that stressed the importance of remembering the dead by keeping track of them individually, recognizing them as people instead of numbers. Specifically, Hu praised the efforts of famed artist and social commentator Ai Weiwei, who is currently in the process of investigating and publishing the...
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