Although China’s air pollution keeps making headlines, its water pollution is just as urgent a problem. One-fifth of the country’s rivers are toxic, while two-fifths are classified as seriously polluted.
China figures heavily in the second season of the Netflix series House of Cards, but how accurately does the show portray U.S.-China relations? Steven Jiang, a journalist for CNN in Beijing, binged-watched all thirteen recently-released web-only episodes over the weekend.
“Everyone in China who works on this level pays who they need to pay.” Mild spoiler alert: These are the words of the fictitious Xander Feng, an influential Chinese billionaire on the Netflix series "House of Cards," a show that follows the machinations of U.S. Representative (and later Vice President) Frank Underwood to agglomerate power and crush whoever stands in his way.
As one of the Four Asian Tigers, Singapore is known for its strong economy and orderly society. The city-state, with its population of 5.3 million people, is listed by the World Bank as fourth in the world in terms of per capita income. As a regional business hub, it is lauded for its sound business reputation and the transparency of its government.
Singapore has also been something of an example for China over the past three decades. A visit by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 provided inspiration for China’s reform and opening up.
From their website:
We support, train, and mentor the next generation of photographers and seek to increase the impact of both historical and contemporary documentary photography in the digital age. Our programs encourage compelling, independent documentation, active collaboration with media and grassroots organizations on distribution strategies, and the innovative presentation and exhibition of high-quality documentary work.
Emily T. Yeh is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She conducts research on nature-society relations in Tibetan parts of the People's Republic of China, including projects on conflicts over access to natural resources, the relationship between ideologies of nature and nation, the political ecology of pastoral environment and development policies, vulnerability of Tibetan herders to climate change, and emerging environmental subjectivities. Her book Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press 2013) explores the intersection of political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization.
Tsering Shakya is the Canada Research Chair in Religion and Society at the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (Penguin Books, 2000).
A casual survey suggests that ninety-eight percent of Sinica listeners have at some point joined Chinese friends or family in watching the annual television spectacular known as the “Spring Festival Gala.” Sadly, whether from excessive pork consumption or the mildly sedative effects of baijiu, the same percentage report occasional difficulties making it through the entire show....
“We didn’t say ‘I love you,’” said Dr. Kaiping Peng, Associate Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. I’d ventured over to his China office on the campus of Beijing’s mighty Tsinghua University to talk to him about the romantic prospects of China’s rising fleets of well-educated, unmarried Chinese known as shengnü, or “leftover women,” but our conversation quickly took a historical detour.
From their website:
The World Press Photo Foundation is a major force in developing and promoting the work of visual journalists, with a range of activities and initiatives that span the globe.
Formed in 1955, when a group of Dutch photographers organized a contest to expose their work to international colleagues. That annual contest has since grown into one of the most prestigious awards in photojournalism and multimedia storytelling, and the exhibition it produces is seen by four million people worldwide each year.
They work to develop and promote quality visual journalism because people deserve to see their world and express themselves freely. Freedom of information, freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech are more important than ever, and quality visual journalism is essential for the accurate and independent reporting that makes these freedoms possible. Today, when the world, the press and photography itself are undergoing seismic changes, they strive to help both visual journalists and their audience understand and respond to these transformations so these freedoms can be secured.
