I’ve already been in the U.S. for a long time. I regret that choice. We’ve been [fooled] by Western media the whole time, making us think that the U.S. is a modernized country. Harboring hopes of studying American modern science in order to serve my motherland, I moved heaven and earth in order to make it over to this “superpower.” But the result has been very disappointing!
Returning to Beijing after nearly 50 years sparks recollections of a China long gone, and the memory of one very special meeting.
Unlike the horrors of the Soviet gulag or the Holocaust, what happened in China during the Great Leap Forward has received little attention from the larger world, “even though it is one of the worst catastrophes in twentieth-century history,” writes Ms. Zhou, an assistant professor of history at the University of Hong Kong, in the introduction to “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962.”
The Asian American Journalists Association organized a roundtable at the Foreign Correspondents Club tonight on self-censorship in Hong Kong, an issue which is prescient in light of the recent Chief Executive election, national education protests, scandals involving coverage in the South China Morning Post, the increasing “Mainlandization” of Hong Kong, and upcoming Legco elections.
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Liu Bo is famous. One of many police officers assigned to quash recent protests over a planned molybdenum copper plant in Shifang, Sichuan province, Bo was famously pictured with a riot shield strapped to his forearm, baton raised, charging at the backs of a small crowd. His bull rush was captured on a mobile device, promptly shared on Chinese social media and soon after appeared in an article by Tea Leaf Nation's own Liz Carter.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s promise to get tough with China may fall on receptive ears in the U.S., but in China his vow has barely registered, much less caused alarm. Unlike in 2008, when the Chinese media and bloggers were intensely focused on the unexpected rise of Barack Obama, the current election has generated limited media coverage and online discussion. To an extent, this shouldn’t be surprising. China is in the midst of a once-per-decade, totally opaque and undemocratic national leadership transition (expected this fall but still unscheduled). Those Chinese who care about politics understandably care more about their own.
The disaffected characters of Pirandello’s work offer us perhaps a way to understand the complaints and parodies of Communist Party rule that abound on the Chinese Internet. If unelected rule had previously allowed China’s party-state to claim omniscient authorship of the nation’s history, censoring and tailoring the narrative as it pleases, the present era of instant digital publicity and micro-blogging has enabled a legion of voices to point out inconsistencies in the Party’s account and to parody the clichés of official story-telling.ci
Mushroom gatherers converge and crawl on hillsides in Qinghai province every March while foraging for wild caterpillar fungus.
Theirs is not a garden-variety morel hunt. Caterpillar fungus is a hard-to-find parasite that infects and mummifies a host before forming a mushroom, the tip of which sprouts from the head of an unlucky caterpillar.
In the intellectual ferment leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen protests, a much-watched series on Chinese television called River Elegy became closely identified with the hopes of China’s reformers. The six-part series, which used the Yellow River as an allegory for Chinese civilization, argued that China should move away from its inward-looking culture, symbolized by the muddy river, and embrace the deep blue oceans that link China to the outside world. One of the series’ writers was a graduate student of Marxism at Renmin University named Yuan Zhiming.
