Apologies for the relative silence as of late, but here are a few comments to whet your appetite:
Isn’t the obvious conclusion from the Obama/Scott Brown/health care debacle that the American political system is hopelessly dysfunctional? We’re faced with the odd situation that a president elected in a near-landslide from a party with large majorities in [...]
James Fallows points to a recent survey by Pew in which a shocking percentage of Americans believe that China is more of an economic superpower than the US. This is of course completely false, as Fallows goes on to explain and then illustrate with a photograph of dormitory conditions at Chinese universities.
I’ve discussed previously that [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Iran is presently holding a presidential campaign, in which the current president finds himself trailing in the polls. Recent accounts indicate that opprobrium between the two camps- those of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi- is high. The two men have been campaigning feverishly across the country, with one holding the support [...]
What is China’s role in the horrifying story of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two US journalists who have been sentenced to 12 years in a hard labor camp for illegally entering North Korean territory?
The journalists insist they were on the Chinese side of the border, something that shouldn’t really be a matter of [...]
Daniel Gross has a new business article up at Slate discussing the rise of KFC, Pizza Hut, and other Yum! Food brands in China. The article is OK on its merits- nothing really new to report- but what interests me is the article title: ‘General Tso, Meet Colonel Sanders’.
Quite clearly, the author of the article [...]
Hu Jia, an AIDS activist currently imprisoned in China for the crime of subversion, was recently awarded the Sakharov Prize by the European Parliament. The Chinese government was displeased, reverting in their criticism of the award to their usual tropes of “interference in domestic matters” and “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people”.
The former critique [...]