In the film The Silk Road of Pop a classically trained Uyghur tambur player tells viewers that Western music such as hip-hop and jazz does not carry the same feelings of love, tradition, and family as Uyghur traditional and folk music. He says he hopes that Uyghur musicians coming of age today do not forget their past. This tambur player, a member of studio musicians who often accompany the King of Uyghur pop Abdulla, is repeating a refrain heard frequently by performance artists trained under the Maoist regime.
Longtime China fellow Brendon O'Kane may have left for grad school in the US, but he's still sporadically China-blogging, now on a Tumblr. He's responsible for finding the above ad, which we can't thank him enough for translating:
A foreigner who knocked down a woman with his motorcycle in Beijing on December 2 -- he's pictured above being grabbed by the victim -- apparently was working "without a permit" in Beijing and has been deported. Talk about escalating fast. Also, he had been driving the motorcycle without a license, so he was fined 5,000 yuan. Oh, and his father was deported as well for working without a permit. What did either of them actually do?
Paul Mooney, Edward Wong, Bob Dietz, and Sarah Cook are in Washington DC to participate in a panel discussion organized by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. "China's Treatment of Foreign Journalists" begins at 3:30 pm ET today (Wednesday) and can be streamed live here. It's a bit early for you China people -- 4:30 am -- but may be worth it if you have nothing better to do.
"Is Beijing about to Boot the New York Times?" asks the headline to this Foreign Policy article (not paywalled!) by Isaac Stone Fish. It's a fair bit of speculation: 12 Times journalists are apparently anxiously waiting for their annual visa renewals, as revealed by two sources speaking to FP on background. (Emphasis on either "anxious" or "still waiting," depending on your level of cynicism about media / China.) About a dozen Bloomberg journalists are reportedly in the same boat.
A group of Chinese dissidents and exiles ran naked on a chilly night outside the Stockholm Concert Hall on Tuesday, December 10, and published a declaration undersigned by Liao Yiwu (pictured above), Bei Ling, Wang Yiliang, Meng Huang, and Wang Juntao. As translated by China Change, the declaration begins:
The New York Times reports that the foreign ministries of the Czech Republic, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia and Hungary have been hacked by the Chinese ("traced to Chinese hackers"). As we've said before, however, "hacked," as used in popular media, is an incredibly broad term meant to encompass a wide variety of malicious online activity, when in fact its actual connotation is much narrower, signifying a sort organized, targeted attack against an individual or institution. In our digital age, we'd do well to employ more specific words when the occasion calls for it -- "phishing," for instance, which is what appears to have happened with the above European countries.
