With Twitter blocked and his Fanfou apparently censored already*, it’s been a rough couple of days for Ai Weiwei, but the new blog remains free. Today, he posted this piece. It’s very short, and very, very poignant. Please, please read this. Translation Let us forget about June 4th, forget this ordinary day. Life has...
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By now you have probably seen this story already. In case you missed it, there’s basically nothing more to it than this: An American basketball player, apparently the guy in the picture below, threw money out of the bus as his team was leaving a game in China on May 23. Many of the...
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China Daily today has a headline that’s too hilarious in its understatement to keep from sharing with you: “Experts: US, China democracy different”. Wow, who would have thought? Thank God we consulted “experts”. Anyway, the New York Times also ran an opinion piece today by Roger Cohen about the potential for democracy emerging in...
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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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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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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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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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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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