‘In the Current System, I’d Be Corrupt Too’

An Interview with Bao Tong

By Ian Johnson on June 14, 2012

Bao Tong is one of China’s best-known political dissidents. In the early to mid 1980s, he was director of the Communist Party’s Office of Political Reform and the policy secretary for Zhao Ziyang, the party’s former general secretary. Just before the 1989 Tiananmen protests were violently suppressed, Bao was detained and charged with revealing state secrets and making counter-revolutionary propaganda. He was convicted in a 1992 show trial and served seven years, all of it in solitary confinement, in Beijing’s notorious Qincheng prison.

Uproar over Aborted Fetus Photo

on June 14, 2012

A Shaanxi Province woman provoked an uproar with an online posting of a photo showing her with her seven-month-old fetus after what she said was a forced abortion.

The gruesome photo was reposted across the Internet in China, prompting provincial officials to announce that a special team had been assigned to investigate and “deal with the case seriously in accordance with the law.”

Private Economy’s Original Sin

on June 14, 2012

Whether measured in terms of gross domestic product, tax contributions or job creation, statistics prove that the private economy plays a crucial role in China.

In some well-developed parts of the country the private sector, when factoring in contributions to employment and tax receipts, accounts for more than 90 percent of local GDP.

The Unwritten Rules in Chinese Technology

By Evan Osnos on June 13, 2012

What do we mean when we say a Chinese company has “close ties to the government”? Or is “connected to the military”? And does this matter? It is a problem that writers on China have encountered for years, and it can be difficult get firm evidence. But now Congress is getting interested in those questions, and the results (if they go public) could make for fascinating reading. Members of the House Intelligence Committee who are investigating spying threats from China have asked two big Chinese telecommunications firms active in the United States to explain their relationship with the Chinese government. In letters to Huawei and ZTE Corp., the lawmakers are asking, for instance, about the role of the “Party committee” and the “work the two companies have done in Iran and their funding arrangements with the Chinese government.”

Business, Military, Politics, Technology
State-Owned Enterprises, U.S. Congress, Huawei

China could be hiding an entire Japan’s worth of carbon emissions

By Brad Plumer on June 13, 2012

Let’s go ahead and state the obvious: It will be impossible to hash out any sort of global agreement on climate change if we can’t even agree on how much carbon-dioxide different countries are actually putting into the air.

Yet the data on this can be surprisingly unreliable — particularly in the case of the world’s biggest carbon emitter, China. A new paper in "Nature Climate Change" finds that there’s a real mystery as to how much carbon China is actually emitting. The national-level statistics say one thing. The provincial-level statistics say another. And the gap between the two numbers came to about 1.4 gigatons in 2010 — a staggering amount, equivalent to all the carbon-dioxide that Japan put into the air that year.

Environment

Northern Girls: Interview With Author Sheng Keyi

By Allison Carroll Goldman on June 12, 2012

Qian Xiaohong is a young woman from a village in Hunan who went to the boomtown of Shenzhen in the 1990s in search of work. She is bold and optimistic, if sometimes a little naïve, and has short black hair with just a hint of curl. She has the round-faced look of a peasant girl from a propaganda poster, but for her most defining feature: her breasts. Full and beautiful, they are much too large for polite society.

Arts, Urban Life
Literature

HK Honey

By Virgile Simon Bertrand on June 12, 2012

High above one of the world's busiest and most congested city streets, urban apiarist Michael Leung runs his crusade for conscious local food, documented in Virgile Simon Bertrand’s inspiring photographs. Leung founded HK Honey as a way of using his background as a product designer to introduce the largely unknown concept of sustainable food to Hong Kong. Initially starting with just a few hives on the roof of his design studio in Ngau Tau Kok, Leung developed both a brand and a responsible community around his lifestyle ideology. “By putting bees in an industrial area we are showing a bit of optimism and that it's not too late to do something about environmental change,” he explains. “Our aim is to get people to know where their food comes from and to source and buy ethically, locally and seasonally.” With hives situated on a number of cafés and design stores throughout the city—including bespoke commissions for Louis Vuitton and Lane Crawford—HK Honey also creates harvestable roof gardens and promotes the development of inner city green space. Here NOWNESS reveals the environmental importance of honeybees.

Arts, Environment, Urban Life
Photography

Does China Need Book Art?

By Iona Whittaker on June 12, 2012

“The art of the book” / books-as-art / artists’ books / “bookworks” / book-objects.... The realm loosely bounded by these terms is characteristically amorphous. Book art’s aura of intrigue and charm hinges on the intimacy associated with reading, combined with the nebulous potential of “art” and all this conjures for the individual mind. Objects, artworks, books: hybrid vessels of the unexpected that hover between reading, seeing, writing and making. Book art’s Western history can be charted from early beginnings with William Blake’s illuminated books, for example; at the turn of the 20th Century, "livres d'artiste" were endorsed by the inspired dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned limited editions illustrated by artists. What has come to be understood less as a medium than a "genre" was expanded later by Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha, whose conceptual approaches in the 1950s and 60s cemented the will to explore, manipulate and deconstruct the book form in an artistic vein.

Arts
Contemporary Art

Randian

on June 12, 2012

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Launched in 2010, randian 燃点 | randian-online.com is owned and run by its editors.

We seek to promote independent cultural debate in China and to foster intellectual exchange between China and the rest of the world. This means independent commentary on art, artists, exhibitions and galleries, as well as video, architecture and design.

Published in Chinese and English, we regularly update our readers on artists, events, exhibitions, film, news, opinion, performance, projects, publications and video.