Absurdity, Allegory and China

It’s been a bad week here. The Sichuan earthquake is, of course, dominating the news and finally kicking the torch relay out of the spots. In fact, there has been much Chinese criticism of the relay now that it has returned to home territory, with calls for it to be suspended and the money saved [...]

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There is an ever-growing list of books and authors writing on the ‘new’ China, and while I do not claim to read much of it, I am always reading about China, though often the works I read are not focused, per se, on the new. One of the newer books I particularly like is Peter [...]

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In the continuing media wars, the China Daily reports
The Foreign Ministry Wednesday summoned CNN’s Beijing executives to lodge a solemn representation for failing to apologize for insulting remarks by one of its commentators…. “Journalists should abide by ethics, and don’t have the privilege to slander or rail at anybody or any government”, Liu [Foreign [...]

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To be officially an atheistic country does not mean there isn’t religion in China, or within the hearts of some of those who sit in The Great Hall of the People. A religion often has nothing to do with a god. In a nominally communist country with 5,000 years – count ‘em, f-i-v-e [...]

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It’s difficult to get the state-sponsored Chinese media to take the least little bit of a breather from hyping the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games (190 days away and counting – the digital counters are everywhere), an event that is trying its best to supplant the Berlin 1936 Olympiad as being the grandest display of hyper-nationalism [...]

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