Via Sean at NeoChaEDGE, here’s a cool visual representation of the Chinese characters of various food items.
Answers after the jump:
Over the past week or so I’ve been working on a blog post summarizing the 2000s and wondering what the biggest themes, events, and trends were, both in China and beyond. When I sat down to write it I realized that there was so much to say that a simple blog post here wouldn’t do [...]
Hey all, a little housekeeping note. I’ve made some changes to the list of sites on the right, including the appearance of a new category listing all of the sites that are kind enough to have published my writing before. What’s the point of having a blog if not for cheap self-promotion?
Under recommended sites I [...]
I really enjoyed this short James Fallows article on how he survived living in the world’s most polluted country, China. The synopsis: it isn’t that hard! Even though Fallows mostly lived in Beijing while I live in the relatively clean Kunming, I can relate entirely to his thoughts.
To those too lazy to click on the [...]
This editorial in the LA Times by Ian Buruma has generated a bit of web discussion recently, but something didn’t sit right with me after reading it.
Buruma begins the editorial by describing Hu Jintao as a ‘dull’ leader and how, in the context of recent Chinese history, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He then [...]
To an outsider the Chinese Communist Party appears to be a monlithic force free of the factionalism that defines multi-party systems of government. In fact, this is not the case- the Chinese government contains divisions that might ring familiar with political observers elsewhere in the world.
This Foreign Policy article published earlier this year defines two [...]
For much of the Maoist era China was closed off to the outside world, and foreigners comprised only the minutest fraction of the country’s several hundred million strong population. Two of the best known foreigners present during the Mao era are Sidney Shapiro and Sidney Rittenberg, both Jewish-Americans who arrived in China even before the [...]
I caught around a half-hour of China’s National Day pagaentry from a small television set in a tiny Dai village somewhere between Baoshan and the Salween River. I only came to the village in order to re-stock on water and mooncakes*, the latter perfectly suited for bicycle energy food.
(Unfortunately I missed the exciting bits; the [...]
24 hours ago I was just settling into a two-hour Burmese massage in Jiegao, a small town located directly on the border of China and the country now known as Myanmar. Now, I’m back in my comfortable office in Kunming, fresh from a shower and clean clothes and with a slightly battered bicycle. This is [...]
Greetings from Tengchong, Yunnan, where I’ve been staying the past two days after surviving the Bataan Death March–i.e. the bike ride over Gaoli Gong Mountain. We had initially planned to spend just a single day in Tengchong but have instead remained for two; the consequence of consuming some bad baijiu at the hostel bar and [...]