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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For a little while now, Ai Weiwei has been using his Twitter account to post information about students who died in the Sichuan earthquake as their birthdays come around. This information, presumably, comes from everything gathered by Ai and his volunteers during their Citizen’s Investigation into the student deaths in the 5/12 earthquake. Today...
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A couple weeks ago, I sent out an informal survey on race to the emails of many of the Chinese people whose blogs I read. I got nothing in response from anyone (a few “mail delivery failures” was all) until a few days ago when I got a response from a rather unexpected place:...
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