It appears that our fair city of Kunming has received international press attention, though not for its beauty, good weather, or fine food. Nope, Kunming’s claim to fame may now be it’s dwarf theme park, which since last year has been open to the public. From the New York Times: Chen Mingjing’s entrepreneurial instincts vaulted [...]
Dan Washburn is a writer I’ve followed since I arrived in China six years ago. Over the past couple of years Dan has shifted his focus to golf, a burgeoning sport that has attracted a certain amount of controversy in China. To say that few Chinese play golf would be a grand understatement- the percentage [...]
China Hush has translated a rather long screed in the form of an open letter from an outraged Chinese to President Obama. The letter is interesting not for its unremarkable message but rather because it provides a useful archetype of how a Chinese fenqing, or angry youth, thinks. Much of the letter consists of a [...]
In Foreign Policy Christina Larson provides a useful reminder that Tibet is no ‘Shangri-La’. My own experience traveling through Tibetan parts of Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces confirms this; Tibetans aren’t the enlightened, beatific race imagined by the region’s more fervent supporters. Yet the Tibetans are, in fact, Tibetan and not Chinese. China likes to tell [...]
One aspect of contemporary Sino-American scholarship largely overlooked is the notion that both China and the United States contain a notion of ‘exceptionalism’ that largely doesn’t exist elsewhere in the world. The most immediate explanation I can think of for why is the enormous size of the two countries as well as their relative insularity [...]
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 [...]
On November 16 US President Barack Obama held an American-style town hall meeting with a group of university students in Shanghai. During the event, the camera panned toward a pretty female student dressed stylishly in black who was seated near the president. Naturally, the identity of this girl elicited the attention of the Chinese internet [...]
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 [...]
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; [...]
I’ve long been skeptical about the role of Twitter in fomenting political change. Skeptical until this Xinjiang uprising, that is. Before the Chinese government blocked the service midday Monday, I read two eyewitness reports, saw several photographs, and read several articles about what had happened. Keep in mind that I follow only about 100 people. [...]