Known in China and elsewhere mainly for being the younger brother of the 43rd president of U.S. and the son of the 41st, Neil Bush is by no means the most famous American user of Sina’s Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service. On Monday, however, few were generating more buzz.
Two members of the Russian punk collective Pussy Riot are on the run and have fled the country, the band said in a Twitter message on Sunday. Three other Pussy Rioters were sentenced to two years in prison this month for performing a “punk prayer” inside Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral. The prayer asked the Virgin Mary to free the country from President Vladimir V. Putin. The case, especially the impassioned closing statements from the three women, caused a worldwide sensation. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, one of the convicted members, said the trial “shows this political system is afraid of truth.”
China has a message for Hollywood: The door to the fastest-growing film market is not wide open. Chinese film regulators say they are cracking down on China-U.S. co-productions as several upcoming films have exploited existing co-production rules to gain easy entry into the Chinese film market, according to a report from the state-owned China Daily. Some film companies are doing the absolute minimum, such as adding a Chinese actor to a film in a supporting role, to slide their movies under a classification that was meant to benefit both markets, the report cited the deputy head of China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, Zhang Pimin, as saying.
The suicide this week of a top features editor at the Communist Party official newspaper People's Daily has sent shock waves through the tightly controlled world of China's state-run media, commentators said on Thursday. Xu Huaiqian, 45, was the editor of the "Dadi" cultural supplement of the paper when he took his own life on Wednesday after suffering severe mental health problems, a friend and associate said via China's microblogging services. "I received a text from a friend to say that ... Xu Huaiqian jumped off a building and died on Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 p.m., because he was suffering from clinical depression," wrote Xu Xunlei, editor of the Hangzhou-based Metropolis Express newspaper.
News of the suicide last week of Xu Huaiqian (徐怀谦), the chief editor of the Earth (大地) supplement of the Party’s official People’s Daily, has prompted a burst of discussion on Chinese social media of the extraordinary pressures facing journalists in China today. According to Chinese news reports and accounts shared on Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, Xu, 45, died on August 22 after jumping from a building. Remembered by colleagues from media across the country as a professional and principled journalist, Xu is said to have suffered serious mental health problems in recent months.
Citizens of the PRC are accustomed to having reams of statistics thrown at them – indeed, contemporary Chinese rhetoric demands that any important speech begin with a recitation of numbers and percentages. The accuracy of such statistics is not taken for granted – even officials at the State Statistics Bureau have been known to advise that the stats they themselves release are best viewed as orders of magnitude.
Considering that their nation is preparing so stealthily to dominate the future, China’s artists seem strangely anxious about what that future may bring. But that is as it should be. We search in vain for signs of nervousness among politicians and business leaders. Tentativeness is not in their vocabulary; not if they want to be successful. Artists, however, are obliged to question everything. And that everything, in China’s case, includes the prospect of leading a tremulous world deep into the torrid unknowns of the 21st century.
A young woman, Ah Qun, has gone where few right-minded human beings would dare go: a heavily guarded mental institution. She is on a mission to track down a mysterious man she spotted the night before who bravely confronted a spooky ghost. But as soon as she enters the compound, she is stopped by a guard. Just when her quest seems finished, the guard is distracted by someone screaming, “Robbery!” Gingerly moving forward, Ah Qun comes across some extraordinary minds: one patient explains Van Gogh’s religious views to his fellow inmates; someone else demonstrates Einstein’s theory of relativity on a blackboard; and yet another recollects a phone call from Steven Spielberg, who was seeking advice on a sequel to Jurassic Park. Suddenly, her target leaps out of nowhere and asks her, “Do you believe in flying saucers and the Loch Ness Monster?” When Ah Qun answers yes, the man says, “We can talk.” Introducing himself as Leo, the man explains that he is deemed insane simply because he is scared of nothing. As he describes the origins of his fearlessness, our visual cuts to a stone-faced child (presumably the young Leo) fending off monsters and taking on wild rides in an amusement park.
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