Song Yangbiao, a reporter for the magazine the Time Weekly, was detained on Sunday according to friends and supporters, apparently after using his Sina Weibo microblog to denounce the trial and call for an uprising to oppose it.
Nine years ago, photographer Katharina Hesse began to make portraits of North Korean defectors. To protect their identities, she allows them to conceal their faces, asking only that they “give something” of themselves to the photographs. And they do. Her subjects bury their faces in their hands, or tuck them beneath the collar of a shirt, but even so, they work with Hesse to make themselves seen.
Nine years ago, photographer Katharina Hesse began to make portraits of North Korean defectors. To protect their identities she asked only that they “give something” of themselves to the photographs. Her subjects bury their faces in their hands, or slip them beneath the collar of a shirt or into the shadow cast by the brim of a hat. Hesse pairs the portraits with images of the desolate terrain the defectors must traverse to cross the border into China and of the brightly lit bridges over the Yalu River that will deliver them straight back to North Korea if they are caught.
While the Internet has become the site of almost constant political arguments in China, few articles have generated as much debate as a recent piece by blogger Wang Xiaoshi. On August 1, Xinhua News Agency, a state-run media outlet, posted Wang’s article, entitled “If China Experiences Unrest, It Will Be More Pathetic Than the USSR,” in a prominent position on its homepage. The article’s targeting of Weibo users reflected an intensification of online political debate.
David Wertime:
Two judges and an official of the Shanghai high court have been expelled from the Communist Party and dismissed from their jobs after being seen on video apparently consorting with prostitutes in glitzy nightclubs.
China’s steel industry has been in trouble since 2011, with numerous bankruptcies nationwide. The city of Tangshan in Hebei province has been no exception.
China announced Wednesday it has fined six milk suppliers, including Mead Johnson and New Zealand’s Fonterra, a total of $108 million for price-fixing after an investigation that shook the country’s fast-growing dairy market.
The People’s Daily and Study Times, ran editorials expressing their opposing views on the issue of constitutionalism: limiting the government’s power by a higher system of laws that protects citizens’ rights.
As China grows, the National Bureau of Statistics’ data remain arcane. In efforts to attain accuracy, The Beige Book curates a report based on their online and in-person surveys of more than 2,000 businesses and banks across China.
