Microblogging in China

By Ai Weiwei on May 27, 2012

In the last several years, microblogs and social-media sites have become ubiquitous platforms for the exchange of information and ideas. This unique opportunity for expression has never before existed in China. Platforms such as Weibo have become the main force for people to question authority and share information, to demonstrate their will and political demands. New forms of technology are uncontrollable and pose an everyday baptism by fire for the authorities in China.

Arts, Society
Social Media

ArtAsiaPacific

on May 27, 2012

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Established in 1993, ArtAsiaPacific magazine is the leading English-language periodical covering contemporary art and culture from Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East. 

Published six times a year, AAP includes features, profiles, essays and reviews by experts from all over the world. AAP’s website offers up-to-the minute news reports, extracts from current and past issues of the magazine, as well as supplementary and exclusive multimedia content.

Since 2005, AAP has produced an annual Almanac edition, published in January, which surveys the past year in the 67 countries and territories covered in the magazine. In addition to news, exhibition, festival and country reports, the Almanac features special sections such as Five Plus One, which spotlights five outstanding artists from the previous year and one promising artist for the next year, and Reflections, a set of essays written by prominent curators and cultural figures.

AAP also publishes exhibition catalogs and artist monographs, more details of which can be found in the shop on this website.

Confucius Institutes Not About Confucius

By Sam Crane on May 25, 2012

They are not about Confucius. Rather, the PRC government has chosen to use the name of Confucius as a trademark of sorts for a global soft power branding project. The Institutes, most of which in the US are hosted by colleges or universities, focus on language learning, with a variety of other cultural activities: Lunar New Year parties: calligraphy; a little Peking Opera; etc. As far as I can tell - and I have been in conversation with many US academics who have CIs on their campuses (my college does not have one) - there is no systematic effort to engage with Confucian thought in any serious manner.

Education, Politics

Hard Lesson for China Concept-Stock Investors

on May 25, 2012

Imagine discovering on your first day as a new CEO that your employer is merely a shell that may be destined for a shameful delisting on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

That’s what happened recently to ChinaCast Education Corp. CEO Feng Yiyi, who is now trying to sort out what’s left of a gutted business that once attracted US$200 million from American investors and ran three Chinese universities with a combined 35,000 students.

Policeman Burned for Dealing With the Devil

on May 25, 2012

On March 17, the Chenzhou Public Security Bureau announced Huang Bailian had been removed as head of the police department’s drug squad.

Huang offered a simple explanation for his sacking: “This is retaliation.”

Three years earlier Huang, who is forty-eight years old and a twenty-five-year police force veteran, cracked what he thought was a major drug trafficking case.

However, before the case reached prosecutors, drugs seized during his arrests went missing and a suspect was set free.

Can CCTV Become the Next Al Jazeera?

By Amy Qin on May 25, 2012

In a recent piece published in the Columbia Journalism Review, Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi assesses the early stages of China's multibillion dollar efforts to expand its domestic media empire onto the global stage. Just this year, CCTV launched two network broadcast centers—one in Nairobi and the other (called CCTV America) in Washington, DC. Radio enthusiasts around the world can now tune into China Radio International, which offers programming in more than sixty languages.