Absurdity, Allegory and China

The China Daily ran a story this morning (h/t @kinablog) entitled “The meat athletes eat can get them branded as cheats“. An official from the General Administration of Sport of China (GASC) denied reports that athletes were banned in January from eating untested pork, beef and lamb in an attempt to avoid doping scandals in [...]

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It’s difficult to get through an entire spring and summer without writing something about baseball, even if it won’t ever get much of a grip here in China. Despite the MLB’s recent series of promo events in Shanghai, Wuxi, Guangdong, Chengdu, and now, as I write, in Beijing. I think baseball has about as much [...]

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It’s been quiet here lately for a variety of reasons, and the most recent reason has been that I have been out in Qinghai province visiting friends. I had been getting quite tired of the extended summer heat, which this year seemed to stretch on a bit longer than recent years. Perhaps it had something [...]

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“I’m in shock. I haven’t eaten in five days. I was in prison in Beijing and now here I’m in a [Brooklyn] restaurant.” – John Watterberg, who, along with another American from Students for a Free Tibet, had a life-altering four-day stay in a Chinese jail during the Olympics, for a five-second wave of a [...]

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Here in Tianjin for the past month it has been quiet, and the normally grimy air has been cleaner. The Games brought a relative peace to the city, if not the promised Olympic windfall, since a dozen soccer matches is hardly enough to make a dent in the vacancy rate of the large number of [...]

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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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As the flap over the audio and video enhancement of the Olympic opening ceremony widens, Zhang Yimou, the director of the spectaculorama, is taking it on the chin. The foundation of his reputation was built upon his portrayal of life in the countryside, showing the world a side of China that the Chinese were not [...]

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I managed to score a free ticket to the US-China basketball game this past Sunday evening. My default resistance to being part of any crowded event usually keeps me far from large, snot-spitting sporting events where the object seems more about getting worked up into a common lather than it does about any higher ideals. [...]

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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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Last night while I was talking with my mother in Philadelphia, a wonderful woman (she’s my mom, after all), she said, “I heard that there was another earthquake in China close to where the big one was in May.” I told her I’d not heard, though as we chatted I got on the web and [...]

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