If you want to know how to help the earthquake victims, you first have to understand what kind of help they need....But from news reports you can only see a pretty picture...If you only watched TV, you’d think that they’re not only happier than people from outside the area, but they’re also happier than...
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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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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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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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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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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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“Abstraction is the most fanatical enemy of memory. It murders memory because it advocates distance and, moreover, aloofness. We must remind ourselves: what was massacred was not the number, it was a person, then another, then another…only in this way can we understand the meaning of ‘massacre’.”
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Perhaps the most frustrating thing about living in China as a foreigner interested in understanding China is just how difficult it can be to get access to anything real. We laowai tend to stick to the cities, and even when we don’t, we are constantly aware that those around us and speaking with us...
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The New York Times thinks maybe: (h/t James Fallows) Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s geological fault line. A...
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