I’ve spent part of this morning listening to a podcast lecture organized by Folger on the subject of foreign impressions of China. The three panelists are Rachel DeWoskin, author of Foreign Babes in Beijing and a former actress in the Chinese soap opera of the same name, Orville Schell, the distinguished China scholar and author [...]
The venerable China Daily has announced that our very own Yunnan Provincial Government has become the first in China to use Twitter, perhaps unaware of the irony that Twitter is tucked snugly behind the Great Firewall of China and is thus unavailable- without a proxy- to the general public.
In honor of Thanksgiving Day I’d like to take the opportunity to thank each and every one of you for reading this blog, particularly those of you who have commented and e-mailed over the past year. It’s been a pleasure conversing with such an intelligent, well-informed audience. I hope you’ll continue sticking around!
Our friend Daniel Gross continues his journey in China for Slate, this time traveling down the Yangtze River to report on progress of the Three Gorges Dam. For the most part this report avoids the inaccuracies that characterized his last one. But at the bottom of the article, in an aside, Gross wonders why he [...]
Slate’s Daniel Gross has made a couple of lazy and incorrect assumptions in his recent column about real estate in China: In Shanghai, which is China’s New York, locals and expats are doing their best to foist American-style consumerism onto China’s rising masses€”with mixed results. Starbucks has opened several hundred stores, even though China has [...]
The big news in China these days is the ongoing visit of President Barack Obama, who met with students in Shanghai Monday and with President Hu Jintao in Beijing yesterday. Nothing earth-shattering is expected to happen during Obama’s visit and in all likelihood both sides will simply utter the same platitudes that have characterized recent [...]
When I was in high school, our kindly headmaster used to speak often of our ‘community’; that was, the students, faculty, staff, and others for whom our school was a daily part of life. My friends and I used to cynically poke fun at him for saying it; at that point in our lives we [...]
My grandmother, who is 93, used to refer to Vetarans Day as Armistice Day, its former name. Without any disrespect to our men and women of uniform- of which her late husband was one- I think it would be instructive to remember the origins of the holiday, which dates back to shortly after my grandmother [...]
Some months ago a young writer named Thomas Talhelm single-handedly blamed Peter Hessler, the author of River Town, for ruining his China experience. Any time Talhelm felt like recording an observation, he realized that Hessler had written about it already; only better. Truly, he wondered, is there anything new left to say about China? Hessler [...]
By my count there are six or so weeks to go until we close the book on the 2000s and embrace the 2010s, something I speculated upon in this recent post. For those of you already feeling nostalgic about the ‘aughts, here’s a blog dedicated to the various cultural ideas that defined the decade. This [...]