Absurdity, Allegory and China

In an essay in the East Asia Forum today, China’s jasmine crackdown and the legal system, Donald C. Clarke, law professor at George Washington University succinctly explains the current state of Chinese law, vis-a-vis the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) vs The People: When the Chinese authorities detained human rights lawyer Teng Biao last year, they [...]

[Read more →]

I probably read the New York Times more than I do any other news outlet (don’t ask me why; habit is all I can answer), though I find myself questioning the quality of their journalism more and more. Thomas Friedman is one who always raises hackles among those who know more about China than any [...]

[Read more →]

If you don’t know the Global Times you should. Here’s a brief sample from their About Us page: Global Times particularly focuses on expressing Chinese people’s real feelings, sharing their opinions and standpoints on significant international issues and promoting their understanding of the global views on China. When I see “Chinese people” and “real feelings” [...]

[Read more →]

I am trying to imagine how I would feel if I went to New York and was confronted with billboards that said, “Civilized Brooklyn.” Or if I were walking through Paris and ran into large public displays that said “Civilized Belleville.” Of course I would wonder, “Why is this being addressed at all?” A weekend [...]

[Read more →]

“This is not a book that should be set aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force.” – Dorothy Parker (What follows is not a book review, but rather a response to a promotional book tour interview by the co-authors of China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society (Harper Collins), John and [...]

[Read more →]

I have been quiet in here of late for a few reasons (excuses?), but my focus has temporarily shifted to creating more of a web presence beyond the blog by building a website to display photos and other content that is not necessarily blog-able. Doing this with a web connection that has done nothing but [...]

[Read more →]

There are moments in our lives that peg us to a position when an event of great weight unfolds. The afternoon of May 12, 2008 is one I will not soon forget. I felt ‘something’ that did not feel right, a noise of some sort as I lay in the bed reading. (I keep odd [...]

[Read more →]

CCTV’s Rui Chenggang, the host of a popular nightly financial news program hates the word “propaganda,” and accurately compares CCTV to Fox News when the GOP held all the cards. According to a feature in the NYT, Capitalism Finds Voice in China, Because his positions often parrot Beijing’s critiques of foreign journalists, Mr. Rui is [...]

[Read more →]

“A fishing pole is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool on the other.” –Samuel Johnson There’s an old joke I heard nearly three decades ago concerning a Fish and Game warden named Joe, whose jurisdiction included a large, well-stocked lake. (I was living  in Wyoming at the time, and the [...]

[Read more →]

This from Reuters, via Yahoo: China targets big websites in Internet crackdown. China has launched a crackdown against major websites that officials accused of threatening morals by spreading pornography and vulgarity, including the dominant search engines Google and Baidu. China’s Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies announced the campaign at a meeting [...]

[Read more →]