Absurdity, Allegory and China

The CCTV Building project has been rife with rumors since before the first hole was dug, and the latest one (via niubi at Twitter) was spotted on Weibao, a Chinese microblogging service. The rough translation (and I stress “rough”) is “Heard that my foolish masters’ big underpants scorched little brother [TVCC] must be demolished tomorrow, [...]

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I have just finished reading Googled by Ken Auletta, and I followed it up with James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly piece, How to Save the News. A lot of good reading here, as well as a much deeper explanation of who and what Google is and what it appears they are doing, though it becomes a [...]

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Here are some photos of the CCTV in color, all taken in the late afternoon/early evening, April 23, 2010

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Photos of the continuing project. (click for bigger pic)

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(This post began as a comment in response to comments to my previous post, Civilized Chaoyang: What Was It Before?. It “grew” into this. I could post another photographic example of the Civilized Chaoyang Campaign, but I won’t. Even I’d consider that as “piling on.” The “new grads” alludes to one of the comments, by [...]

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The sculpture at the east end of the Kerry Centre across the Third Ring Rd. from the CCTV Building is a piece by Sun Yu Li, a Singaporean artist whose website can be found here. I had referred to this piece in an earlier blog post as the “recently installed yin yang-ish sculpture that allows [...]

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Last March I wrote a post anticipating the Olympic protests in support of a ‘free’ Tibet. Nothing prescient, mind you; anyone with a tooth in their head, and a lot of folks without, could have anticipated attempts at extreme displays. If your plan is to make a scene, I am asking you to review your [...]

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In early June I went to the CCTV Bldg. to have a look and what I found cocked my brow a few degrees: on the roof of the northwest tower, Tower 1, there was a helipad, a circular affair that oddly took the edge off the well-defined linear profile. A circle of all things! As [...]

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I’ve just arrived back in Tianjin from four days in Beijing, and there’s so much to talk about I hardly know where to begin. Photos of the CCTV Headquarters Building seems to be as good as place as any while I collect my thoughts. There’s the bullet train from Tianjin to Beijing (and vice versa, [...]

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