It’s that time of the year. Or decade. Or something. The stars have finally aligned and YJ and I actually have time off at the same time,* so we’re packing our bags and heading to the birthplace of Chairman Mao, Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, and really freaking spicy food…Hunan. No offense to Hunan’s most famous fat [...]
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Now some teachers will write about their students, sharing odd or quizzical bits from papers and exams for the sake of humor. I wouldn’t do that to my students, but OTHER people’s students…sure, why not? From an op-ed on China and North Korea in Student Newspaper from the University of Southern State, USA*: The Chinese mentality is nothing [...] California Assemblyman Paul Fong (D – Mountain View) is seeking federal reparations for the discrimination suffered by Chinese immigrants coming to the United States in the 19th and early 20th century. From the San Jose Mercury News: Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Mountain View, wants us to remember that when the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in New York Harbor [...] I’m not a tech guy, but I despise state-sponsored censorship, so I’ve been following the epic fail of the Green Dam software with a certain admitted sense of schadenfreude. The whole thing has been a disaster from the start which is rather amazing given the usual attention Chinese state-owned companies pay to such things as “innovation,” [...] This is either an online photographic archive documenting an interesting cultural phenomenon which touches on a host of issues worthy of further study and research…or a fetish site. Could go either way. (h/t Sinosplice via Adam Schokora [...] From The People’s Daily Online: The State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) bought the rare manuscripts of Hu Shi’s letters at the price of 5,544,000 yuan in China Guardian’s 2009 Spring Auction Saturday. It is the first time the State decided to use the preemptive right to buy a cultural relic. Dozens of letters between New Culture Movement [...] Another week another column for The Global Times. (And in case you’re wondering, my soul feels no less decayed than usual.) This one is on basketball with a little foreign relations thrown in by way of [...] Work in the sites around the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi has proceeded in fits and starts since the terracotta soldiers were first discovered in 1974. In recent years, Chinese archaeologists have held at bay local officials eager to develop tourism at all costs, and instead approached further excavation cautiously, seeking to avoid damaging priceless antiquities yet [...] Via Asian Studies WWW Monitor: Chinese Ancient Texts (CHANT) Database Research Centre for Chinese Ancient Texts, Institute of Chinese A description of, a guided tour, and online contents of: History may or may not repeat itself, (The Propellerheads suggest it does, I disagree but I think it comes close enough every once in awhile to scare the bejeezus out of the human race.) But like flu epidemics and movies starring Colin Farrell, certain rhetoric has a nasty habit of reappearing every so often with the [...] Jim “Beijing” Boyce called my attention to this piece in National Geographic : A Delaware brewer with a penchant for exotic drinks recently concocted a beer similar to one brewed in China some 9,000 years ago. Sam Calagione of the Dogfish Head brewery in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, used a recipe that included rice, honey, and grape and hawthorn [...] This date in 1957 marked the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Movement, a crusade launched by the party leadership in the wake of Mao’s rather impetuous call to “Let 100 flowers bloom.” Like a lot of 20th century Chinese history, it’s a tragicomic tale and the subject of one of my favorite earlier posts, “Mao and the Marriage [...] Just a few quick links from over the weekend while YJ gets Sunday dinner on. Best part about pingfang living? Al fresco dining…May to October. For those of you who don’t have a high-school aged Chinese student living with you (or missed the mothers chain smoking by the side of the road) this weekend is the [...] Half the town on any given day is wearing white. While Wang Dan may have been going for a ‘subtle gesture of protest,’ it’s possible the ‘wear white day’ idea was a little too subtle. Kind of like: “If you wish to honor the memory of the Tiananmen dead, don’t shave your left eyebrow completely off on Thursday morning.” [...] |
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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: Iranian Fenqing?
The (increasingly nervous) supreme leader of Iran speaking on the demonstrations this week in his country:
The ayatollah reached beyond Iran to criticize “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for seeking to portray Iran as divided and accused what he called arrogant Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, of hostile comments, saying they failed to [...]