Sinica Podcast

11.13.13

Daoism for the Action-Oriented

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
{vertical_photo_right}What Would Confucius Do? What for that matter would Laozi not do? This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy ask these and other questions of Sam Crane, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Politics at Williams College and author of...

Culture

11.11.13

All He Needs is a Miracle

Debra Bruno
Courtesy of the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History A portrait of Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci by You Wenhui; painted at the time of Ricci’s death in Beijing, 1610. It now hangs at the Jesuit residence in Rome. It is the...

Activists Challenge Beijing by Going to Dinner

China Digital Times
On the last weekend of every month, government critics gather for unassuming meals in as many as 20 cities across the country to discuss issues from failures in the legal system to unequal access to education. 

China’s Communist Party HQ Hit by Series of Explosions

Tom Phillips
Telegraph
Media reports claimed that improvised explosive devices packed with metal ball bearings and nails and concealed in roadside flowerbeds were detonated at around 7:40 in the morning in Taiyuan, the capital of coal-rich Shanxi province. 

Explosions Kill 1, Injure 8 in North China City

Reuters
The official Xinhua news agency said what appeared to be small-scale bombs went off outside an office building of the Shanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party. Taiyuan is the capital of Shanxi province. 

How China Profits From Our Junk

Adam Minter
Atlantic
The son and grandson of scrap metalists, reporter Adam Minter traveled throughout the world to investigate how what we discard—and reuse—helps drive the global economy. 

China Story Yearbook 2013: Civilising China

China Story
“China Story Yearbook 2013” contains a rich range of translated material from Chinese sources related to politics, social change, urban transformation, law and order, international relations, the economy, the Internet, major news...

Another Massive Photoshop Fail in China

David Wertime
Foreign Policy
Social media in China lit up with mockery another obviously doctored image, this time posted on the Ninguo, Anhui government website, purporting to show vice-mayor Wang Hun pay a friendly visit to an elderly woman. &...

China’s State Media Calls for Strong Action on Tiananmen Attack

Reuters
Chinese state media demanded severe punishment on October 31 after the government blamed militants from restive Xinjiang for an attack in Tiananmen Square, as the exiled leader of the region’s Uighur minority called for an independent probe.&...

Chinese Police Hunt for Two Xinjiang Men After Tiananmen Crash

Tania Branigan
Guardian
Chinese police are hunting for two or more men from the troubled region of Xinjiang amid growing suspicion that a fatal car crash and explosion in Tiananmen Square on Monday was a suicide attack. 

Police Examine Possible Xinjiang Link in Deadly Tiananmen Crash

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
After the car crash in Tiananmen Square, Chinese authorities have now named two suspects from Xinjiang, the troubled western region whose ethnic Uighur population has become increasingly disenchanted with Chinese policies.  

Jeep Crash in China’s Tiananmen Square Leaves Five Dead

Jonathan Kaiman
Guardian
Authorities have blamed separatist groups for stirring up trouble, but exiles and human right groups argue that the government has been too quick to identify violent incidents as the work of terrorists. 

Wikipedia China Becomes Front Line for Views on Language and Culture

Grace Tsoi
New York Times
The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia has become more than an online encyclopedia: it is a battlefield for editors from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a region charged with political, ideological and cultural differences.&...

Unhinged in China

Ian Johnson
New York Review of Books
“A Touch of Sin” is made up of four interlocking stories that are meant to encompass the geographic sweep of China, and what director Jia Zhangke sees as the epidemic of violence and amorality in modern Chinese life. 

Chinese University Defends Outspoken Teacher’s Firing

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
In the week since Professor Xia Yeliang was dismissed, university officials have been buffeted by criticism that their decision was in retaliation for his activism against the government.  

Media

11.07.13

After Party Headquarters Explosions, Netizens Debate Value of Violence

On the morning of November 6, an unknown assailant or group of assailants reportedly detonated several bombs outside the front door of the provincial government headquarters of Taiyuan, the capital of Northern China’s Shanxi province. China’s state-...

How to Deal with the Chinese Police

Perry Link from New York Review of Books
A casual visitor to China today does not get the impression of a police state. Life bustles along as people pursue work, fashion, sports, romance, amusement, and so on, without any sign of being under coercion. But the government spends tens of...

Books

11.06.13

The Birth of Chinese Feminism

Edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, Dorothy Y. Ko
He-Yin Zhen (ca. 1884-ca.1920) was a theorist who figured centrally in the birth of Chinese feminism. Unlike her contemporaries, she was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global historical problems. This volume, the first translation and study of He-Yin’s work in English, critically reconstructs early twentieth-century Chinese feminist thought in a transnational context by juxtaposing He-Yin Zhen’s writing against works by two better-known male interlocutors of her time.The editors begin with a detailed analysis of He-Yin Zhen’s life and thought. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1874-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), to which He-Yin’s work responds and with which it engages. Jin, a poet and educator, and Liang, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that liberals like themselves should defend. He-Yin presents an alternative conception that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends. Ahead of her time, He-Yin Zhen complicates conventional accounts of feminism and China’s history, offering original perspectives on sex, gender, labor, and power that remain relevant today.  —Columbia University Press{chop}

Media

11.06.13

Sex Ed Videos Go Viral

Liz Carter
A collection of sex education videos have just gone, ahem, viral on the Chinese Internet. On October 29, a three-person team calling itself the “Nutcracker Studio” released three one-minute clips addressing tough topics in childhood sex education,...

The Challenges of Conveying Absurd Reality: An Interview with Yu Hua

Megan Shank
Los Angeles Review of Books
Thus, Los Angeles Review of Books Asia Co-editor Megan Shank and Yu exchanged Chinese-language e-mails about history’s most over- and underrated Chinese writers, the evolution of an ancient language and why Yu will never read&...

Sinica Podcast

11.05.13

Terrorism in Tiananmen, Politics at Peking University

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, we return to our China roots with a show covering recent developments in the news including the recent terrorist attack in Beijing and political hiring-and-firing at Peking University. Joining Kaiser and Jeremy to talk about...

Video

11.05.13

Small Part, Big Screen

Gilles Sabrié
Every morning outside the imposing gate of the Beijing Film Studio, a throng gathers to try to find a way inside. These aren’t fans, exactly. Look at their faces, the practiced way they crane their necks or square their shoulders when the man with...

Media

10.31.13

Tiananmen Attack Spotlights China’s Beleaguered Uighurs

On October 28, a jeep plowed into a group of pedestrians and burst into flames on the avenue next to Tiananmen Square, the massive public square in Beijing that is the symbolic heart of the Chinese capital. According to Chinese state media reports,...

Sinica Podcast

10.29.13

Chinese Literature in Translation

Jeremy Goldkorn, Linda Jaivin & more from Sinica Podcast
This week, Sinica is delighted to be joined by Linda Jaivin and Alice Liu for a discussion on Chinese literature in translation. As many listeners will know, Linda is a long-standing force in the Chinese literary community and the author of many...

Media

10.29.13

Why “2 Broke Girls” Is All the Rage in China

In China’s battle between cupcakes and Communists, the cupcakes appear to be winning. While Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes the “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation with mixed success, the U.S. sitcom 2 Broke Girls has drawn Chinese...

Excerpts

10.28.13

Stark Choices for China’s Leaders

Damien Ma & William Adams
One Beijing morning in early November 2012, seven men in dark suits strode onto the stage of the Great Hall of the People. China’s newly elected Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping stood at the center of the ensemble, flanked on each...

Mixed Marriages in China a Labour of Love

Zoe Murphy
BBC
In 1978, there was not a single inter-racial marriage registered in mainland China, according to government figures. But the numbers of Chinese marrying foreigners has gradually risen, with 53,000 such couples tying the knot in 2012.&...

In China, ‘Everyone is Guilty of Corruption’

Lijia Zhang
CNN
Much as I appreciate our president’s determination in his fight against corruption, his battle feels like an attempt to “put out a big fire with a glass of water,” given how corruption has reached every corner of our society. 

Newspaper Publishes Front-Page Call for Journalist’s Release

Oiwan Lam
Global Voices
A Guangzhou-based newspaper, the New Express, published a front-page editorial statement urging the Security Bureau of Hunan Province to release their investigative reporter Chen Yongzhou who was arrested for criminal...

To Live and Die in Ordos

Derek Elley
Film Business Asia
This film is a character study of a socially responsible cop in a get-rich-quick modern bordertown whose life conveniently sums up the social and ethical tensions through which the whole country has been going during the past decade or so. 

Unhinged in China

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
In one of the central scenes in Jia Zhangke’s new film, a young man working in the southern Chinese manufacturing city of Dongguan goes to an ATM and finds that he’s broke. He’s just spent the past month betraying his friends and hopping from job to...

Books

10.24.13

The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon

Liz Carter and Anonymous, Edited by Anne Henochowicz
Over the years, China Digital Times (CDT) has collected hundreds of words and turns of phrase invented by China’s citizens of the Internet, its “netizenry.” Playfully evading online censors, netizens have created a world of “grass-mud horses” and “river crabs,” forever locked in battle in the “Mahler Desert.” CDT’s Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is a collection of politically-charged terms which represent netizen resistance discourse. This eBook includes a selection of “classic” terms which have endured beyond the events which generated them. They are arranged by category, and indices in alphabetical order by both English and pinyin are included. This is the netizen language you need to know to understand China’s Internet. —China Digital Times{chop} 

China: “Capitulate or Things Will Get Worse”

Perry Link from New York Review of Books
The massacre of protesters in Beijing on June 4, 1989, and the harsh repression during the months immediately following put China into a foul mood. Among ordinary Chinese, the prestige of the Communist Party, whose leaders had ordered the brutal...

How to Say ‘Truthiness’ in Chinese

David Wertime
Foreign Policy
In the face of recent policies assaulting their right to speak out on the internet, grassroots Chinese are trying to turn the mirror back on officialdom by calling out instances where officials or state-owned media made statements that turned out to...

China’s Silly War on Starbucks Lattes

Rachel Lu
A C.C.T.V. investigation into Starbucks’ jacked-up prices in Mainland China has backfired, prompting many netizens to ask why the television station doesn’t cover more widespread and egregious injustices.

Chinese Regulators Restrict Imports of T.V. Formats

Clifford Coonan
Hollywood Reporter
The new order is aimed at pushing domestically produced and “morality-building programs,” in line with the recent campaign to decrease vulgarity on Chinese T.V. The vacated slots will have to be filled with news, education programs and...

Robbed in China? Remain Calm and Call a Foreigner

David Wertime
Foreign Policy
Photos circulating on Chinese social media have bolstered the perception among Chinese citizens that victims of crime who hold foreign passports are granted special treatment and more attention by the police. 

Top Chinese University Expels Outspoken Economist

Didi Tang
Associated Press
Peking School of Economics’ Xia Yeliang was expelled for his political views and activism, including his vocal support of democracy, his involvement in the drafting of Charter 08, and his refusal to comply with government directives to de-politicize...

The Labor Shortage That Could End China’s Economic Boom

Damien Ma and William Adams
Foreign Affairs
Based on its track record, the purely economic dimensions of an economic transition don’t seem more daunting than the other feats the C.C.P. has pulled off. Instead, it’s the social and political dimensions of the demographic hangover that seem most...

Media

10.22.13

China’s Silly War on Starbucks Lattes

There are worse things in the world than an overpriced latte. That’s the message that thousands of Chinese web users are sending China Central Television (CCTV), a state-owned media behemoth that ran an October 20 segment accusing the Seattle-based...

China Holds Two Bloggers As It Expands Crackdown on Rumors

Sui-Lee Wee
Reuters
Police in China have arrested an influential blogger and are holding a cartoonist in a widening crackdown on online “rumor-mongering”, friends and a lawyer for one of them said on Thursday October 17. 

What China Thinks of the Shutdown

Isaac Medina
Diplomat
The notion of a government shutdown is strange for the average Chinese person because its consequences in the People’s Republic would go far beyond closed federal agencies and parks, but it has also helped the Chinese better understand the U.S...

Media

10.18.13

Cross-Culture Fail Watch: “Blacklist” Bungles One-Child Policy

Chinese Internet users have a message for the screenwriters of The Blacklist: You’ve got a lot to learn about our country.The third episode of The Blacklist, a new NBC television drama in which the FBI and a former fugitive team up to fight...

Viewpoint

10.15.13

Trust Issues: Hong Kong Resists Beijing’s Advances

Sebastian Veg
When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, expectations were high—in Beijing and among the pro-mainland forces in Hong Kong—that identification with the Chinese nation would slowly but surely strengthen among the local population,...

Former Google China Chief Faces Online Attacks

Josh Chin
WSJ: China Real Time Report
Major Chinese Internet portals have republished an essay from an official media website that implies that Kai-fu Lee lied about being diagnosed with cancer, in what some of his supporters are calling a coordinated ad hominem effort...

5 Things About China’s New Aged-Care Law

Associated Press
The changes in the law in China reflect an increasingly urgent dilemma across the world: As populations age faster than ever before, families and governments are struggling to decide who will protect and provide for the old. Too often, the answer is...

‘Where Are the Riots?’: China Watches the Shutdown

Jiayang Fan
New Yorker
In China’s social media - what amounts to China’s largest and most liberal classroom - microbloggers are taking the opportunity to teach one another the difference between federal and local authority in America and the protections, and perils, of...

The World’s Most Active Twitter Country?

Victor Lipman
Forbes
In terms of active Twitter users (defined as those “who used or contributed to the platform at least once a month”), the country with the most users was China, with 35.5 million, even though Chinese netizens are restricted from using Twitter.&...

Parents Bribe to Get Students into Top Schools, Despite Campaign Against Corruption

William Wan
Washington Post
Almost everything, from admission to grades to teacher recommendations, is negotiable in Chinese schools if you know the right person or have enough cash, a fact that's worsening rather than mending the vast gap...

Li Tianyi Sentencing Is Small Step for Chinese Women

Didi Kristen Tatlow
New York Times
In the trial of Li Tianyi, the 17-year-old son of prominent entertainers in the military on trial for gang rape, an important detail in the court’s recent ruling may improve thewelfare of the women who work in China’s illegal but widespread...

Old Dreams for a New China

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Ever since China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, first uttered the phrase “China Dream” last year, people in China and abroad have been scrambling to decipher its meaning. Many nations have “dreams”; in Canada, the country’s most prominent popular...

Media

10.11.13

How Social Media Complicates the Role of China’s Rights Lawyers

Xia Junfeng was once unknown, but his 2009 arrest for the murder of security officers—who, he alleged, had savagely beaten him—made him a symbolic figure in a national debate about human rights and reform in China. Yet many wonder whether this...

Reports

10.10.13

Congressional-Executive Commission on China: 2013 Annual Report

United States Congress
The Commission notes China’s lack of progress in guaranteeing Chinese citizens’ freedom of expression, assembly, and religion; restraining the power of the Chinese Communist Party; and establishing the rule of law under the new leadership of...

Chinese Police Shoot Dead Seven Uighurs in Kashgar

Qiao Long and Luisetta Mudie
Radio Free Asia
Four died after police in Yarkand county, which is administered by the Silk Road city of Kashgar, opened fire on a group of Uighurs in a private residence on October 3 after suspecting them of “illegal assembly,” the Munich-based World Uyghur...

Uighurs in China Say Bias Is Growing

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
Discrimination in employment, common across western Xinjian, is one of the many indignities China’s 10 million Uighurs face in a society that increasingly casts them as untrustworthy and prone to religious extremism.  

Beijing's 20 Most Interesting People

The Beijinger
Beijinger
Even if nothing interesting could be written about 99 percent of Beijing's approximately 20 million people, there would still be 200,000 great stories remaining.

Sina C.E.O. Charles Chao on How Weibo Is Changing China

Liz Gannes
All Things Digital
“Before, if anything happened, any accident or disaster, the information can be withheld or contaminated by government media control; but now it’s impossible, almost, to withhold information,” Chao said at the Stanford University China 2.0...

‘A Touch of Sin,’ Four Tales from China by Jia Zhangke

Manohla Dargis
New York Times
A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, “A Touch of Sin” is at once monumental and human scale. A story of lives rocked by violence, it has the urgency of a screaming headline but one inscribed with emotional weight...

Xi Jinping Hopes Traditional Faiths Can Fill Moral Void in China

Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard
Reuters
President Xi Jinping believes China is losing its moral compass and he wants the ruling Communist Party to be more tolerant of traditional faiths in the hope these will help fill a vacuum created by the country’s breakneck growth...

Mao’s Little Red Book to Get Revamp

Tania Branigan
Guardian
The re-emergence of Quotations from Chairman Mao comes amid an official revival of the era’s rhetoric. Xi Jinping has embraced Maoist terminology and concepts, launching a “mass line rectification campaign” and even presiding over...