Hope you had a nice Lantern Festival links. PS: I'm speaking at Dada on Wednesday at 7 pm or so for Beijing Creatives 7.0, so swing by if you're interested in some inside-baseball blog talk.
Caption: "Recently, a detachment of officers and men from the People's Armed Police in Liangshan, Sichuan held roses to depict 'thousand-armed Guanyin,' celebrate Valentine's Day's arrival, and use this opportunity to express sincerest wishes to their sweethearts a world away."
Reporters Without Borders released its latest version of the World Press Freedom Index, and apparently China has cancer. It ranks sixth from the bottom, at 175, below Vietnam, Iran, Cuba, etc. To give you an understanding of how bad Reporters Sans Frontières believes the situation is:
The Bookworm Literary Festival event schedule is out, and our poetry event is included. (Tickets go on sale Saturday.) A reminder that submissions are being accepted until March 1. Links now.
The temptation, when evaluating a poet gunned down by his government, is to start there, with the politics that led to his murder. But Wen Yiduo (1899-1946) was much too complex and heterodox to comfortably wear the martyr's robe, his works too nuanced and unsettled to be a paragon of any revolution. His poems explore religion and rickshaws, contain the chrysanthemums of Chinese folklore and the mud of contemporary times, and dare readers to challenge prevailing conceptions, even to render their own cynicism as hope.
For the last 38 years of Hong Kong's existence as a British colony, a very British-looking flag flew over the city, featuring a cartoonish lion/dragon insignia and some rather ugly red text (HONG KONG) on yellow background. That flag was retired on July 1, 1997, after the handover ceremony, in favor of a red flag featuring a white five-petal bauhinia flower.
Someone in Sochi didn't get the memo.
