Jottings from the Granite Studio

Dave at The Mutant Palm has posted a critique of the “guang’gun goin’ to hell” narrative that pops up every so often. The short form of that story is that sex-selection in family planning, exacerbated by the One Child Policy, is creating a bachelor bomb (a generation of guang’gun 光棍 or ‘bare sticks’) that will […]

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And so a moment I thought I would never live to see has happened twice this decade…the Red Sox have won the World Series. Unfortunately with my teaching and my research schedule I had to watch most of the games on the Internet rebroadcast…except for game 4, for which Wu Ming spilled the beans over […]

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It has been a busy week here. YJ is finally finished covering the 17th Party Congress (she claims to have won the office pool on the leadership selections). Personally, I’ll just be glad when we can get through breakfast and/or dinner without listening to CCTV news droning on with lists of names.
Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao….Wu […]

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Of all the hoary myths that pervade US media writing on China, one that irks historians quite a bit is the hoary chestnut of an inert, uncompromising China being “opened” by the dynamic, technologically and politically advanced West in the 19th century.
Prefacing his review in this week’s The Nation, foreign policy author John Feffer compares […]

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Professor Tao Dongfeng, of Capital Normal University in Beijing has an op-ed piece posted today on UPI Asia. Professor Tao argues:

In my opinion, the fundamental problem of China’s education system now is a warped understanding of the purpose of study, of the concept of education and of ideas about human beings and society. These produce […]

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As I look out my window here in Beijing, I can see directly across the street to the roof of the local police station where a woman has perched herself on a narrow ledge and is threatening to jump. The police are in full scramble mode with officers below clearing the street and a few […]

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I noticed my hit counts jumped three fold this week and sure enough, blogger is unblocked again in the PRC. Of course, a lot of those hits are people looking for “sex” and wandering onto an old post about Chinabounder, but no matter. Such is. We’ll see how long this unblockage […]

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At the risk of this becoming a Chairman Hua fansite…thanks to Chris Amico for spotting the former chairman in a NYT slide show of the 17th Party Congress.

According to the NYT caption writers, that’s Hua (sleeping, we hope) on the top left. I mean, he looks asleep…but I wouldn’t put it past the CCP […]

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Donald Tsang (amusingly dubbed “Darth Bow Tie” by the chattering set) seems to have gotten himself in a bit of sticky wicket:
From AP:
Hong Kong’s leader said Friday that too much democracy could lead to another Cultural Revolution, when gangs of youths were given free rein to persecute suspected government opponents in mainland China.
Donald Tsang’s […]

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As Beijing readies itself for the 17th Party Congress, much of the gossip, I mean analysis and speculation, is focused on who will be put in a position to take over power when Hu Jintao retires in five years.
Ah, for the good old days of a major natural disaster portending the death of the leader, […]

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