An uproar over the U.S. Olympic team's made-in-China uniforms is a blasphemy on the Olympic spirit which is supposed to separate sports from politics and a show of pure ignorance to boot, China's official Xinhua news agency said on Monday.
The impact of the internet on society in China is arguably greater than in any other country on earth. Not only does it give people channels to express themselves - something which for political reasons has previously been almost impossible - but the increase of microblogging has amplified the internet's impact still further. China's most popular microblogging service Sina Weibo - run by the country's largest internet portal, Sina.com - now boasts at least 300 million registered users, making it a serious challenger to Twitter. Here we look at some examples of people whose lives have been changed by Weibo.
Twenty-three journalists who formerly worked for the South China Morning Post have written an open letter to the paper’s group executive director, Hui Kuok, expressing their concern that critical coverage of China is being abandoned in order to please the Communist authorities in Beijing.
It was with a mix of trepidation and anticipation that I read Dambisa Moyo’s newly-released book, “Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What it Means for the World”: trepidation because my colleague Michael Levi and I are currently finishing a book on China’s resource quest; and anticipation because it is actually fun to read a book on a topic on which you are writing … as long, of course, as it doesn’t say exactly what you planned to say.
Media regulators issued rules this week tightening censorship rules on web video content while encouraging private investment to consider stakes in state media companies. The combination of the new rules has resulted in mixed signals for the direction of the culture industry. Standing at odds with claims made last year to foster creativity in the culture industry, media regulators are now moving to boost state media and restrict digital content.
China's top newspaper slammed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday for comments she made lauding democracy and implicitly criticizing restrictions in China, saying those Asian countries that ape U.S. democracy were doomed to fail.
Yu Jie is one of China’s most prominent essayists and critics, with more than thirty books to his name. His latest work is a biography of his friend, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, that was published in Chinese in Hong Kong a few weeks ago. It is not the first time he has stirred up controversy in China. Yu first gained fame in 1998 at age twenty-five for his book Fire and Ice, a series of biting, satirical essays on contemporary society.
LOCAL legend has it that the beauty of the grasslands in Xilin Gol, a prefecture in eastern Inner Mongolia, so captivated the 13th-century warrior Genghis Khan that he planned to settle down there once his battles were over. He might be less impressed if he saw it today. In recent years a rush to mine the region’s abundant minerals has scarred its hills, desiccated its pastures and fuelled unrest among its Mongol herders. For the local Communist Party chief, Hu Chunhua, who many believe is being groomed as a future leader of China, these are difficult times.
For those who worry about North Korea, the past few months can best be described as a time of quiet despair. Since North Korea reneged on the "Leap Day" food aid deal in March by announcing the test of a long-range rocket (the test later failed), it has become painfully clear that neither engagement nor sanctions will deliver what many in Washington still consider to be the only acceptable outcome: the denuclearization of North Korea. And China, long considered the best hope to push North Korea in the right direction, has spent the seven months since Kim Jong Un took power stepping up its efforts to maintain the status quo for its unstable neighbor, increasing aid and trade with Pyongyang.
