Last summer I took a trip to Xinyang, a rural area of wheat fields and tea plantations in central China’s Henan province. I met a pastor, a former political prisoner, and together we made a day trip to Rooster Mountain, a onetime summer retreat for Western missionaries and later for Communist officials. From its peak we looked down on China’s Central Plains, which stretch six hundred miles up toward Beijing.
Xu Bing, the renowned Chinese artist whose many laurels include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and an appointment as vice president of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, has long demonstrated a fascination with the written word.
With China’s new leadership now set, Chinese Web users have turned their attention to answering the key question: “What’s next?” In concert with the 18th Party Congress, the website of Communist Party-sanctioned Peoples’s Daily hosted an online poll asking Web users about their hopes for future development.
Retired leaders in China's Communist Party used a last-minute straw poll to block two pro-reform candidates from joining the policymaking standing committee, including one who had alienated party elders, sources with ties to the leadership said. Two sources said the influential retirees flexed their muscles in landmark informal polls taken before last week's 18th party congress, where the seven--member standing committee, the apex of China's power structure, was unveiled.
The chart of the day shows the falling percentage of women in the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee, a group of about 200 members that includes all seven men on the nation’s top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee. Women accounted for 4.9 percent of the latest Central Committee unveiled last week, down from 7.6 percent in 1969, the year Nixon took office. Also shown is a ninefold surge in the number of women in the U.S. Congress during the same period.
Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot.
Pantsov and Levine show Mao’s relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death.
Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao’s creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China’s last emperor. —Simon & Schuster
Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker (December 10, 2012)
Andrew Roberts, The Wall Street Journal (October 5, 2012)
Roderick MacFarquhar, The New York Review of Books (October 25, 2012)
Thomas P. Bernstein, Foreign Affairs (November, 2012)
Japan's foreign minister argues that there is no doubt that the Senkaku Islands, known as the Diaoyu in China, are a part of Japan.
Sky City and its 2,749 feet distributed over 220 floors will grow in just 90 days in Changsha city, at the rate of five floors per day.
From their website:
We come from the future.
Tech, science, and culture for tomorrow.
A doctored photo of China's top officials doing a popular South Korean dance went viral 'til Chinese censors pulled it down.
