Jottings from the Granite Studio

I wrote about this last month based on a piece by Paul Mooney in The National, but this week Inside Higher Education has a longer take on the denial of visas by the Chinese government for scholars and historians working in areas deemed sensitive by the manpurse-toting narrow-minded intellectual gerbils who staff Zhongnanhai Glorious All-Wise [...]

[Read more →]

Mara Hvistendahl writes in The New Republic this week about the possibilities of future unrest and social ills as unintended consequences of China’s One Child Policy.  I wrote a little something about this last year:
There are many factors that can contribute to social instability and political unrest, but having a large population of young, underemployed, and [...]

[Read more →]

Report out of Tianjin, the city by the sea, only 80 miles east and 20 years behind Beijing…residents are doing what they can to alleviate the bad luck of China’s annus horribilis by, what else, setting off firecrackers to blow away the bad luck.
In particular, there are fears that certain gods might be interested in [...]

[Read more →]

Anne-Marie Slaughter writing at the Huffington Post on Senator Obama:
The cliché is true; he makes us proud to be Americans. That feeling was particularly strong for me because of a recent conversation I had in Beijing with a number of Chinese academics and fairly high-ranking party officials. The conversation quickly turned to American politics, and [...]

[Read more →]

I’m still posting updates on events over at The Peking Duck and there is quite the conversation going on as well. Many sites, including The Opposite End of China and You Tube are down. Obviously journalists and foreigners in general are being denied access to affected areas. Members of the Tibetan community here in [...]

[Read more →]

Some notes from Saturday’s Dodgers/Padres game here in Beijing.

Overall, we had a great time. It was a beautiful day for baseball. A little chilly and windy perhaps, but nice sunny skies.

Wukesong Baseball Stadium was not particularly impressive, but suitable for the purpose. It has an obvious “won’t be around in 2009″ feel with temporary [...]

[Read more →]

I flaked on Froog last night. I was completely beat from a day of translating documents and just didn’t have the energy to go out after midnight to watch the FA Cup game between Manchester United and Arsenal. I have a hunch that I’m in for a raft of crap about how my tepid support [...]

[Read more →]

This week was Valentine’s Day, and no matter what you think of market-driven holidays, it does provide a good occasion to take your wife out for a quiet dinner in an otherwise hectic week. Wanting to avoid the overpriced and crowded Valentine’s Day “specials” at the Chaoyang restaurants, we decided to go local: Dongcheng style, [...]

[Read more →]

Professor Li Xiaojiang, of Zhejiang University, is a pioneer of women’s and gender studies in the PRC. She published Renlei jinbu yu funu jiefang (”Human progress and women’s liberation”) in 1983, one of the first scholarly articles in her field ever published in the PRC. In 1988, Professor Li wrote an essay analyzing the situation [...]

[Read more →]

Last night, in between mass consumption of jiaozi and the occasional trip outside to blow shit up, we gathered around the television for the annual CCTV New Year’s Gala. I’m a cornball at heart and I actually get a kick out of the program, so in the spirit of Chunjie, I thought I’d pass along [...]

[Read more →]