Absurdity, Allegory and China

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 [...]

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I finally went to Beijing at the end of this past week (March 12 & 13, 2009) and, unsurprisingly, spent some time around the East Third Ring Rd. photographing the CCTV project. I’d received a phone call a week or two ago to tell me that a high fence was being erected around the spectacular [...]

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Two stories rolled through my feed reader in the last few hours, both of which are well worth a look.  The first is from the Times Online by Philip Delve Broughton: Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse: If his fellow Harvard MBAs are all so clever, how come so many are now in disgrace? If Robespierre [...]

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“Tiny is as tiny does.” Frank Zappa I have a confession to make, though there are no “Bless me fathers” to go along with this one. Between 1968 and 1972 I was in the US Navy, and much of that time was spent at sea, and all of the sea time was either in and/or [...]

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On March 10, 2008  the following article appeared in the China Daily: Five-star Beijing-Tibet train to run after Games. Luxury passenger train service from Beijing to the southwestern Tibet Autonomous Region will be launched on Sept. 1 [2008]. The tickets were gaggingly expensive – $5600 USD per person – and the projected departure schedule was [...]

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According to the buzz on Twitter – niubi – it appears as if a more accurate assessment of the CCTV fire, which destroyed the Television Cultural Center (TVCC), has been reported on Caijing.com.cn magazine (subscription-based in Chinese, not English). According to niubi, who is a wealth of information on all things China, “1 bldg structurally [...]

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