Absurdity, Allegory and China

I had to make a quick trip to Guomao this morning, so, of course, I brought along my camera. I wanted to follow up on a story from a couple of days ago. Late Friday morning, December 23, 2011, during the demolition of a building near the CCTV Headquarters Building, a part of said building [...]

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I probably read the New York Times more than I do any other news outlet (don’t ask me why; habit is all I can answer), though I find myself questioning the quality of their journalism more and more. Thomas Friedman is one who always raises hackles among those who know more about China than any [...]

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“This is not a book that should be set aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force.” – Dorothy Parker (What follows is not a book review, but rather a response to a promotional book tour interview by the co-authors of China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society (Harper Collins), John and [...]

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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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“A fishing pole is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool on the other.” –Samuel Johnson There’s an old joke I heard nearly three decades ago concerning a Fish and Game warden named Joe, whose jurisdiction included a large, well-stocked lake. (I was living  in Wyoming at the time, and the [...]

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In a recent article in the WSJ, the Bush administration’s chief muffin man and ‘architect’ of the bloody madness, Karl Rove, pitched a possible explanation as to why the Bush White House has been so terribly ineffective. In what can only be described as an act of political taxidermy and stick-in-your-eye propaganda that we’ve come [...]

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I know that picking on party rags is fish-in-a-barrel sport, but it’s Christmas and I’m full of good cheer. A wander over to the (English) People’s Daily Online today found this one floating on the surface: A new year approaching amid intense turmoil,  which outlines the world financial crisis in terms that are pretty odd. [...]

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A good look at the machinations of the folks in censorship central of the Propaganda Department can be found in The American Scholar in an article by the Chinese-American and former PLA member Ha Jin entitled The Censor in the Mirror. The office that Chinese writers, artists, and journalists dread and hate most is the [...]

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