David Levine’s depictions of Chinese notables—and everyone else he drew, for that matter—are so sublime that very often after seeing an image, one is left hardly able to remember what the real person actually looked like.
In China, the Gangnam phenomenon carries a special pique. It has left people asking, Why couldn’t we come up with that? China, after all, dwarfs Korea in political clout, money, and market power, and it cranks out more singers and dancers in a single city than Korea does nationwide. Chinese political leaders are constantly talking about the need for “soft power”—they have dotted the globe with Confucius Institutes to rival the Alliance Française, and they have expanded radio and television stations in smaller countries that might be tired of American-dominated news. Last year, the Communist Party even declared culture a national priority and vowed to produce its own share of global cultural brands.
Though China is currently in the global spotlight, few outside its borders have a feel for the tremendous diversity of the lives being led inside the country. This collection of compelling stories challenges oversimplified views of China by shifting the focus away from the question of China’s place in the global order and zeroing in on what is happening on the ground. Some of the most talented and respected journalists and scholars writing about China today profile people who defy the stereotypes that are broadcast in print, over the airwaves, and online. These include an artist who copies classical paintings for export to tourist markets, Xi’an migrant workers who make a living recycling trash in the city dumps, a Taoist mystic, an entrepreneur hoping to strike it rich in the rental car business, an old woman about to lose her home in Beijing, and a crusading legal scholar.
The immense variety in the lives of these Chinese characters dispels any lingering sense that China has a monolithic population or is just a place where dissidents fight Communist Party loyalists and laborers create goods for millionaires. By bringing to life the exciting, saddening, humorous, confusing, and utterly ordinary stories of these people, the gifted contributors create a multi-faceted portrait of a remarkable country undergoing extraordinary transformations. —University of California Press
Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, The Wall Street Journal (September 20, 2012)
Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books (August 16, 2012)
Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times (November 4, 2012)
Which came first? The corruption or the mistresses? In China, they most often go together. The stories abound: from the corrupt official in Fujian who, in 2002, held the first (and only) annual competition to judge which of his 22 mistresses was most pleasing, to Liu Zhijun, the former railway minister deposed in 2011 for allegedly embezzling the equivalent of millions of dollars -- and maintaining a relatively modest 18 mistresses. The association is so strong, in fact, that it’s all but taken for granted in China that when an official falls due to his -- and it’s almost always a he -- misdeeds and miscalculations, the mistresses will be uncovered next.
China’s great migration started with farmers boarding crowded trains in Sichuan, Henan, and Hubei - poor provinces in China’s interior. A day or two later, they arrived here, along the Pearl River Delta, just north of Hong Kong, and became factory workers. Nearly a quarter of a billion people made this journey over and over for the past two decades. It was the largest human migration the planet has known, and it was fueled by our desire to buy things and by the Chinese hunger to make a better life for their families.
On the same day last week that President Obama was issuing an order blocking a Chinese company from acquiring several Oregon wind farms, the Financial Times had a fascinating story on the changing politics of the U.S. trade relationship with China. While both the president and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney are trying to one-up each other over the economic threat posed by China, the mayor of Toledo, Ohio – the swing state of all swing states – was busy courting some 150 potential Chinese investors, trying to persuade them to bring jobs into the hard-hit local economy.
When looking for Chinese reactions to the anti-Japanese riots that took place in late September, it was probably not much of a surprise that the Western press turned to Han Han, the widely read Shanghai-based blogger. In characteristic form, Han gave a riff on the protests that obliquely criticized the government, while at the same time insulated himself from making a direct accusation: “As far as looting and destroying things, this must be punished by law, or else I might suspect that there was some official backing behind all this.”
A sea change is rippling through many Chinese factories. A workforce once dominated by women is now increasingly male. China’s one-child policy chips away daily at its competitive advantage in manufacturing for export, first by choking the supply of labor of both sexes, then by restricting the flow of women into factory jobs. The result is a more restive male workforce, frustrated by crude management and a thick, low glass ceiling.
Coverage of China in Western media tilts toward the political and economic, so it might surprise some to learn that the top trending terms this summer on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, have mostly related to the season’s top television hit: The Voice of China. The show has topped charts nationwideevery Friday that it has aired, with as much as 3.3% of nationwide viewership. The names of contestants and judges often comprise more than half of Weibo’s top 10 trending terms, even edging out the term “Bo Xilai” in the wake of his ouster.
In the last fifty years, the global human population has nearly doubled, while the average calories consumed per person has increased by about 30 percent.
To cope with the ever growing demand for food, more land has been brought into agricultural production, mainly by clearing forests, and farming has become much more intensive. Fertilizers, pesticides, and development of new plant varieties have allowed farmers to increase the average yield of food per hectare to increase by 130 percent in the same period.
