Jottings from the Granite Studio

Brilliant interview with noted historian Wu Si regarding the illegal kilns in Shanxi and forced labor in general. HUGE props to Joel Martinson for the great translation. Wu Si dug through the archives and notes that forced labor, especially in the mining sector, has a long and tortuous history. Disconnects and dissonances between the […]

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Bill Simmons’ annual NBA Draft Diary on ESPN.com had this to say about Yi Jianlian going to the Bucks:

I’m starting to come around on Yi — the thought of him shoveling out his car in minus-10 degree weather in January while fighting back tears and screaming, “Why????? Why?????” in Chinese is delightful for some reason. […]

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Received an email this week at the Granite Studio:
You always hear people talking about people have bad public manners and very low level of trust of strangers in China. As a Chinese , I think this is true. Lots of people blame this on the Culture Revolution. My question would be was there more mutual […]

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“An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will” - Thomas Jefferson————————Blogspot is down. Blogsome is down. Type pad. Word press.
People are pissed.
Two things come to mind:
1) This is going to get worse before it gets better. The CCP has shown no particular evidence that such niceties as “access to information” and […]

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Since Blogspot has once again been “harmonized,” I thought it might be useful to repost this useful little Blogspot workaround:
Originally posted March 27, 2007:
Dave from Mutant Palm has posted a fix for the CCP’s kabosh on Blogspot. As a public service, I am reposting here. It took me a couple of tries to get it […]

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Great post and translations by Joel Martinson over at Danwei about the controversy surrounding the recent college textbook, Essentials of Modern Chinese History (中国近现代史纲要). Textbook controversies in East Asia are bit like Florida rainstorms in the summer…a 10-minute intense burst of activity at exactly 3:00 p.m. every day which is soon forgotten when the […]

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Seems like somebody was out sick the day the Kool-Aid was passed around at the Annual China Daily staff picnic and KTV party:
China Daily columnist (h/t CDT) You Nuo writes:

The lack of investigative reporting also has to do with the fact that, despite the award ceremonies that appear in the press almost daily, there has […]

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Last week Chinese authorities rescued 500 people–many of them children–from brick factories in Shanxi. The workers had been sold to these kilns by unscrupulous labor agencies and then kept there against their will as slaves, working 18 hours a day under the constant threat of physical abuse. All the while, authorities in the province […]

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Before any of my colleagues back home get on my case…Yes, I do know that today is the 137th anniversary of the Tianjin “Incident/Massacre/Dissertation fodder.”
The lessons so far: Buying orphans is a bad idea because it makes people want to sell you other people’s children, Manchus make bad officials, the French are even worse, and […]

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Nothing is more ubiquitous in Beijing than the brigades of bao’an—the rent-a-cops in their off-teal floppy uniforms guarding (to use a verb loosely) the entrances and exits to apartment buildings, stores, construction sites, restaurants, offices, tourist sites, parks, markets, public urinals, random trees, and the occasional “lone wolf” bao’an standing at attention somewhere for no […]

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