Absurdity, Allegory and China

There is a very good review by Emily Yeh, assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, at China Dialogue entitled Restoring the grasslands? concerning the Chinese program “retire livestock and restore grassland” (tuimu huancao). Introduced in 2003 the program called for “grazing removal in order to halt and reverse severe grassland degradation.”
I [...]

[Read more →]

Curious article in the Shanghai Daily today (h/t @niubi on Twitter), reporting on a Beijing News article regarding repairs to the TVCC building, the burned and lesser brother/neighbor of the iconic CCTV Bldg. This has been expected since Rem Koolhaas stated in a WSJ piece The Sky’s No Longer the Limit back in May 2009 [...]

[Read more →]

This post began as a response to a comment in an earlier blog post, where my friend Paul recommended that I read the following link: Google vs China: capitalist model, virtual wall, which I have done, and which initiated this entry.
What I see at this point as possibly the most important aspect in this digital [...]

[Read more →]

I have slept “on the speech” and I must be frank, nothing more came to me that I didn’t go to bed with. Perhaps, you might think, reading Samuel Beckett’s Molloy as I nodded off didn’t help, but I’d argue that anything Beckett is required for preparing for the discussion of any topic that is [...]

[Read more →]

It’s midnight here in China, and I’ve just finished listening to Secretary of State Clinton’s “major foreign policy speech,” though I must say that I am really unsure what just happened. I am tired and about to go to bed, but my assessment is that it felt like a lot of big and very fluffy [...]

[Read more →]

I was fortunate enough to watch live last evening the informative roundtable discussion hosted by the New America Foundation Authority, Meet Technology: Will China’s Great Firewall Hold? as I mentioned yesterday here. For those interested in internet freedom on the eve of Secretary of State Clinton’s speech on the subject, I’ve embedded the YouTube link [...]

[Read more →]

Mark this one on your calendar: Authority, Meet Technology, “…a Slate/New America Foundation event about China, Google, and Internet freedom.”
How will the China-Google skirmish shake out? What lessons or cautionary tales does China’s experience offer repressive governments and their tech-savvy opponents in places like Iran and Cuba? What, if anything, should the Obama administration do [...]

[Read more →]

A provocative question was posed at DigiCha in the title of a blog post a few days back: Will Google, Facebook and Twitter Please Join as Sponsors of the USA Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010
What better message could the USA send to the world than to have the three standard bearers of 21st century [...]

[Read more →]

A post at ESWN (EastSouthWestNorth) entitled The Truth About The Google Affair claims to have information of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plants within Google’s Shanghai office. While this in itself would not be a surprise, that it took so little time for it to actually become public is. The post is “a translation of an [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s one just because I like it. And it reminds me of my favorite, still-under-construction Chinese television station project. For the rest of this very cool new font, called Priori Acute, from Jonathan Barnbrook’s font family for digital type foundry Emigre, go here. (h/t Core77)

Priori Acute is the latest addition to the Priori family. [...]

[Read more →]