Absurdity, Allegory and China

There is a good piece by John Leicester in the Seattle Times concerning the former Chinese gymnast, Dong Fangxiao, who won a bronze medal at the Sydney 2000 Olympics: China leaves underage gymnast in the cold. Ms Dong is now at the center of a records falsification storm, abandoned by the officials who most likely [...]

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If you follow this blog you know I am not a fan of Jacques Rogge, the current president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). He is seen by many – this blogger included – as a CCP lapdog and a free agent who, under the charade of officialdom, always goes to the highest bidder. In [...]

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China vs. the University of Calgary (UC), the latest chapter in the Chinese passion play, is a Chinese foreign policy trial balloon let loose (prematurely?) on the western Canadian plains. This began last week when it was reported that China had removed UC from its list of accredited universities a move school officials are concerned [...]

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It’s difficult to get through an entire spring and summer without writing something about baseball, even if it won’t ever get much of a grip here in China. Despite the MLB’s recent series of promo events in Shanghai, Wuxi, Guangdong, Chengdu, and now, as I write, in Beijing. I think baseball has about as much [...]

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Two photos of the CCTV project A few years ago we spent several weeks in Tuscany, mostly and delightfully in Florence, with several days in Orvieto and a week in Cortona. We returned to Florence for our flight back to Paris, and unfortunately were booked on Meridiana Airlines and spent more time in Florence than [...]

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It took eight (8) months, but I was finally able to get the Guardian to correct two stories from mid-August, 2008. I wrote about this incident both here and here. So, today they finally published a partial correction: A news story published during the Olympics in China reported that two protesters had abseiled down the [...]

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Very good essay at The China Beat blog by James Leibold entitled “Whose People’s Games? Ethnic Identity and the 2008 Beijing Olympics” This sort of chauvinism is largely hidden and subconscious. Take for example, the use of Han actors to portray the minority children at the opening ceremony. Facing criticism from the foreign media, BOCOG [...]

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It’s been quiet here lately for a variety of reasons, and the most recent reason has been that I have been out in Qinghai province visiting friends. I had been getting quite tired of the extended summer heat, which this year seemed to stretch on a bit longer than recent years. Perhaps it had something [...]

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“I’m in shock. I haven’t eaten in five days. I was in prison in Beijing and now here I’m in a [Brooklyn] restaurant.” – John Watterberg, who, along with another American from Students for a Free Tibet, had a life-altering four-day stay in a Chinese jail during the Olympics, for a five-second wave of a [...]

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Here in Tianjin for the past month it has been quiet, and the normally grimy air has been cleaner. The Games brought a relative peace to the city, if not the promised Olympic windfall, since a dozen soccer matches is hardly enough to make a dent in the vacancy rate of the large number of [...]

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