One of my favorite journalists working in Beijing today is Evan Osnos, who has acquitted himself most ably carrying on the tradition of excellent China writing in The New Yorker. His vignettes on the Letter from China blog are always a must-read and today’s short piece, entitled “Life after Google“, concludes on a rather elegant and poignant note:
There is, however, a deeper, more troubling sensation. As Americans living in China at this moment in its history, many of us have fashioned an image of a country that is moving—in its own shambling pattern of fits and starts—toward something better for itself and the world. Sure, it thrashes around a lot along the way, but on many days it seems to end up a fraction of an inch closer to a better, healthier, more humane way of life. But this is not one of those days. A superpower that is willing to jettison a tool so central to life as a global citizen begins to look less like a calculatingly pragmatic steward of its people’s interests and more like an addled Goliath.
Well said.
I’ve said it before, but nothing makes the CCP look more like a bunch of insecure moonbats than their fixation on “guiding public opinion” (read: censorship and propaganda). The 2009 SCIO Internet News Work training session recently wrapped up in Beijing, and over the next few days China Digital Times is publishing translated notes from the meeting.
I strongly encourage readers to check out the full posts on CDT, but I couldn’t resist commenting on two sections.
The first comes from Li Wufeng, Bureau Chief of the State Council Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau. In Mr. Li’s opening lecture he criticized “Small newspapers and websites republish each others’ stories, creating media hype. For example, the Deng Yujiao incident and the Hangzhou street race case.” For those of you not following “small newspapers” in China, Deng Yujiao was a woman arrested after defending herself from being raped by a local official (the official died) and the latter case involved a young man in Hangzhou who attempted to use his family’s money and influence to protect him after he killed a pedestrian while drag racing his Nouveaurichemobile.
Yes…how truly horrible, if newspapers spend all of their time exposing corruption, how will they
It’s November, which is one of the worst times to visit Beijing. The other bad times include December, January, Chinese New Years, March, April, May 1st Holiday, June, July, August, the first part of September, and the October 1st holiday.
November is cold, it is gray and dusty, and the city folk are in dark moods as they stack cabbage and coal and prepare to hunker down for five months of winter.
But none of that matters to Barack Obama. And we must thank the president (or so goes the rumor mill in my hutong) for inspiring the Beijing weather gnomes over the past few weeks to cast their spell for early snow and crisp blue skies with a thin dollop of white stuff to cover the usual Beijing beige.
Yesterday, President Obama participated in a “Town Hall meeting” in Shanghai with the youth in Asia. Now I grew up in New Hampshire so I know a thing or two about town hall meetings, but yesterday’s event (highlights here) was so tightly scripted and cautious it made the Republican National Convention look like Burning Man.
Adam Minter at Shanghai Scrap offers his thoughts, writing that President Obama’s performance resembled “an
Time reviews Founding of the Republic. I confess, I still haven’t seen the film out of protest over SARFT’s rejection of my suggested translation, The Birth of a (Chinese) Nation. Unsurprisingly, the film reveals just as much about the contemporary concerns of China’s current crop of politicians as it does about the founders of the nation.
The Taipei National Palace Museum weighs in on the Yves St. Laurent/Yuanmingyuan disputed relics. The same week that Taipei unveiled a new joint exhibition on the Yongzheng Era, a cooperative effort with the Palace Museum in Beijing and featuring pieces from both the Beijing and Taiwan collections, the Taipei Museum has refused to exhibit two bronze sculptures looted from the Old Summer Palace in 1860. The bronzes were put on sale in a contentious auction earlier this year.
Finally, from last week, The Guardian has a piece on the struggle by author Xiao Jiansheng to publish a simple book of history during this time of memorials and celebrations of, well…history.
In class two weeks ago we were watching the documentary series China From the Inside when one of my students asked, with some reason, that if there was so much hardship and discontent why does the CCP enjoy such broad support?
It was a good question, and like all good questions it depends on whom you ask and how you phrase the question. A middle-class manager in a multi-national company in Beijing is likely to have a more favorable view of current policies than, say, a farmer living next door to a factory that blatantly ignores environmental regulations while making the products sold by the middle-class manager in Beijing.
This stands to reason. But I think on a more fundamental level there is something which brings the farmer and the yuppie together: the question of what do you fear the most?
In Western Europe and North American our dystopian nightmares, those of science fiction and political thrillers, as well as in our history books, involve tyrants who acquired too much power and used that power to brutalize people. Hitler. Stalin. Darth Vader. (Even) Mao. The United States was founded on a profound paranoia over anything that has a whiff of “tyranny” about it. And in the past few
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