With power, what does a man buy first? A mistress, of course, especially in this country, where it’s been said that “a man without a mistress is useless.” But in Shenzhen on Monday, someone held a little demonstration to push back against the practice of taking ernai (literally, “second wife”). Around Book City outside the Grand Theater... Read more »
Japan’s highly respected daily The Asahi Shimbun suggested in an article on Monday that Xi Jinping was unhappy with the way the “media control division” handled last week’s Southern Weekly ordeal. Specifically, Xi was unhappy with the way Liu Yunshan, chief of the propaganda department and a longtime Hu Jintao guy, forced newspapers around the... Read more »
Have North Korean special forces infiltrated this Dandong restaurant's waitstaff? Did Doctor Who bring a squadron of Red Guard back from the Cultural Revolution to change the course of history? While it's difficult to ascertain how this restaurant's waitresses turned into a crack troop of freaky deaky soldiers, one thing is for sure: parents won't be bribing anyone to get their children a rank in this army.
In Guangzhou recently, the German TV station Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) was interviewing a young man about Southern Weekly when a team of plainclothes police allegedly swooped in and smuggled him into a white van. The description on the YouTube video from channel ChinaNewsChannal suggests that the officers kidnapped the man, Jiang Di, because he was giving the... Read more »
In a December interview on a Phoenix TV talk show, Jackie Chan made comments that Western media have recently described as "anti-American" -- ...really? I think his comments regarding America are immature, but they're not without reason. What a lot of reporting has ignored is that Chan was speaking in Chinese on a Chinese television channel, and the message he was delivering to a Chinese audience was this: “Yes, China has flaws, but if you talk about our country's shortcomings with foreigners, they'll misinterpret the message.”
Not every kitten in this story survives, so just go ahead and click away now if you don’t want to read about it. Amid tragedy, however, we also have a tale of human compassion in the form of a spontaneous, group effort to rescue all that could be rescued. Yesterday, a truck carrying more than... Read more »
Foreign commissioning editors get a lot of pitches like this: “The Chinese are now watching Homeland / eating caviar / behaving like us.” These activities usually owe to the fact that a few ultra-wealthy Chinese have found some new, pointlessly expensive Western habit — like high-end gold hi-fi aficionado clubs, or bottles of purified Moon water... Read more »
Late Sunday night in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, a fire broke out at a furniture factory in Anji county that no one noticed for hours because they couldn’t see it through the “fog.” Xinhua has the report (my translation): Due to a thick fog cover at the time, the initial smoke and open flames actually lasted nearly... Read more »
Perhaps the yelling in the background is a cry of existential angst at a futile and heretofore meaningless life.
That every step has led to this exact moment. That even if fought and won, the tide of Fate would inevitably lead back to this very moment: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.”* Oh, would the Heavens open and strike down these untermensch enforcing their slave morality!
China's video-sharing platforms are full of amateur card throwers and fruit ninjas (we featured one here in August who had Guinness aspirations), and the reason is pretty simple: there are more than a few people who find it cool and interesting. In Xishui county, Hubei province, for instance, one young man was so inspired by fruit-slicing card-flingers that he decided to try it himself, and after two to three years of practice and perseverance, he graduated to the ranks of sensei.
