Shaq in China: A Love Story

on January 10, 2014

At seven-foot-one, roughly 350 pounds, and with a smile that’s been featured on everything from cereal boxes to CD album covers, Shaquille O’Neal isn’t particularly hard to recognize. And yet there I stood at the airport arrival gate in Chongqing, a city of 30 million people in Southwestern China, holding a placard that carefully read “Shaquille Rashaun O’Neal”—as if I might mistake this Shaquille O’Neal, the iconic NBA superstar that I grew up idolizing, with some other Shaquille O’Neal.

Historical Value: A Chinese Town Appraises Its Past

By Leah Thompson on January 10, 2014

The once-grand entrance of the Mingxian Hall is locked and hidden behind splintered boards and overgrown greenery. Wang Shouchang, a sixty-seven-year-old farmer from Bishan village, leads us into the cramped kitchen of the farmhouse next door and heads through a passageway on the far wall. What stands before us is breathtaking: a soaring space whose ruined grandeur is only made more compelling by the way it has been packed to the rafters with the humblest of everyday junk.

China: Reeducation Through Horror

By Ian Buruma on January 9, 2014

Here are two snippets from a Chinese Communist journal called People’s China, published in August 1956:

In 1956, despite the worst natural calamities in scores of years, China’s peasants, newly organized in co-operatives on a nation-wide scale, produced 2,740 million Yuan’s worth more farm products than in 1955, an increase greater than the average annual increase in the previous three years….

The Drying Up of China’s Largest Freshwater Lake

Local Fishermen and Wildlife Lose Out as Poyang Lake Falls Victim to Drought and Dams

on January 8, 2014

When Jiang Minsheng moored his fishing boat on the eastern shore of Jiangxi’s Poyang Lake in November last year, he didn’t expect to it to be marooned. The fisherman’s village is on an island in the middle of the freshwater lake, once China’s largest. But Jiang was caught off guard by the premature arrival of the dry season, and now he is stuck in Duchang, a town on the lake’s shore, until the rain returns.