Absurdity, Allegory and China

A few months back (October 14, 2011) Rem Koolhaas, brand architect behind OMA, the architectural firm that has been involved with the design and building of the iconic CCTV Headquarters Building on the East Third Ring Road, was the subject of an article in Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek: Pritzker Star Koolhaas Frets Over EU, Tops Giant Beijing [...]

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Below are some shots I’ve taken over the past 8 days. When a friend comes to Beijing you find yourself going to places you normally wouldn’t go, though many of the sites are too good to pass up for a one time trip to the Jing. I also ended up taking a couple of spins [...]

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The persistent and very public meltdown of Herman Cain (the latest is here) has gone beyond the obliviously wretched clown phase and into the obliviously wretched grotesque phase that continues to reveal his fundamental lack of understanding that he’s morphed into the latest caricature of the guy who doesn’t get it. Politics and political races are rife with [...]

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Melissa Chan at Al Jazeera does great reporting of CN. Her story The Lumbini project: China’s $3bn for Buddhism is a fine piece on Lumbini, Nepal, the birthplace of Prince Gautama Siddhartha, and the current target of a Chinese business man (with no help from the government! Really!) who wants to turn the sacred site into [...]

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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 [...]

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May has not been a good news month here in China. The continuing drought in Central China has closed the middle reaches of the Yangtze River to shipping, as well as causing power outages and electrical shortages that will continue into the summer months, negatively affecting manufacturing and agricultural production at a time when inflation has already [...]

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It’s hard to ignore a story with the title 80,000 flee Shenzhen clampdown, even when the source is the Global Times (GT). What I learned, by digging a bit deeper, is that for two weeks in mid-August Shenzhen will be hosting the XXVI (26th) Summer Universiade, a multi-sports competition for international university athletes. (And, yes, there [...]

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There used to be hope for China. Or at least the appearance of hope. Hope that things were getting better, though what getting better actually meant had everything to do with how bad it used to be in the earlier stages of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Dynasty: the Great Leap Forward, the politically-inspired [...]

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Yesterday all participants in China in the October 23, 2010 GRE examination administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) received the following email, canceling the scores of all participants, because “a previously used edition of the test was mistakenly administered.” They also go on to say that this was an “isolated incident.” I would expect [...]

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The last two mornings have seen capital sunrises in the capital city, and below are a few photos of Beijing architecture from both mornings, shortly after sunrise. (Click on each photo for a larger version that opens in a lightbox.)

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