Time has released its most recent edition of the Time 100, its click-baity list of "the most influential people in the world in 2014." Among those on the list is -- no surprise -- Xi Jinping, who got a three-paragraph writeup from former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman. The opening sentence should raise some eyebrows:
The Guardian recently published a series of photos by Ami Vitale, who was given exclusive access to the Wolong National Nature Reserve in Chengdu to photograph the giant panda, a creature that you and I and the general public knows as comely and cute. Vitale, however, reveals a darker, sinister side, a world of paraphilia, cages, and kinkplay in which China's national symbol is transformed into an object of flesh that -- willingly or unwillingly -- engages in deviant sex and/or some sort of atavistic fetishism. Prepare to never look at pandas the same way -- or the bipeds who love them.
An AH-64E Apache helicopter appears to have tried to land on the side of a residential building on Zhongzheng Road in Longtan, Taoyuan, Taiwan around 10 am this morning. Helicopters should not try to land on the side of buildings. The two pilots -- one of whom was reportedly a student -- were sent to the hospital.
People's Daily, the gift that keeps on giving, did a most glorious thing at 1:39 am today by "publicly condemn[ing]" a parody Twitter account, The Relevant Organs. "We have noticed that a Twitter account has been misleading people by stealing People's Daily 's web address and National emblem of China to make false impression that the account is related to China officials or People's Daily," reads PD's tweeted statement.
The WeChat-Facebook conflict, a battle for hearts and minds that has simmered for months around hotpot tables where expats and exchange students boast about their respective weaponry, has turned hot.
A series of ads recently released on the Youtube channel WeChatSouthAfrica poke fun at Social Network Boy Mark Zuckerberg. The ads -- currently three of them -- are set in the study of a German psychiatrist who prescribes "ze WeChat" to a despondent Zuckerberg.
On April 13, 2014, Abdulbasit Ablimit, a 17-year-old from a small town near Aqsu, was shot twice. It appears he had run a red light on an electric scooter and, rather than stop and pay a fine, he had fled. According to his friends, he was gunned down three kilometers later. The official state narrative, posted a few days after the incident, says he attacked the police officers with stones, tried to grab their guns, and so on.
Regardless of how, Abdulbasit died within hours. His body was given to his family for burial. But he was not buried.
On a crisp September 1st morning in Beijing, I stood before a locked iron door. On the other side was a hutong that led to the streets and eventually my university dorm. On my side was a scruffy courtyard home, a room with no couch and only one big bed – on which slept my Chinese boyfriend. It was dawn, and the hutong roofs were limned by a light morning mist, releasing the heat of the night into a new day. Inside, I was trapped, faced with an undesirable decision: to take a hammer to the door, or to return to the bed and have sex with a person I no longer respected.
