The Atlantic is running an ongoing series called “Scenes From 21st-Century China,” in which it seeks to show the PRC is a “vast, dynamic nation that continues to grow and evolve.” (We last posted about this in June.) Its latest installment, published Monday, features 42 stunning hi-res images that go a long way toward accomplishing that... Read more »
Longtime China resident Cam MacMurchy, who ran the well-respected Zhongnanhai blog for several years before co-founding The Nanfang earlier this year, is nothing if not a reasonable and fair writer. We’ve watched from afar as The Nanfang, a community-driven website covering the Pearl River Delta, has steadily grown, expanding its listings every week while continuing to produce interesting... Read more »
This story made us chuckle. Via Global Times: According to a report on the Taiwan-based NOWnews website, the man surnamed Luo, 27, is an engineer in Hsinchu, and the woman surnamed Lin, 21, lives in New Taipei City. // Luo and Lin became acquainted in an Internet chat room at the end of last year. // In... Read more »
Ai Weiwei + Instagram + Gangnam Style = This Inevitability. No context necessary. We never would have pictured him doing PSY’s famous dance with friends in any other way. This deserves to be turned into a caption contest. Picture by XuYe1226, via @aiww.
The sickening footage of child abuse in a Guangzhou kindergarten earlier this month has itself a sequel. On October 15, a teacher at Blue Sky Mentesuoli Kindergarten, an unlicensed school in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, lost her temper and struck three children, as caught on tape (above, and after the jump on 56.com for those in China). One... Read more »
What exactly is the price of life? What’s the price of life if one has no money? And what’s life actually worth if it’ll just be filled with pain and suffering? These are all questions that have haunted philosophers for millennia, and everyday citizens since the start of the modern medical era. In China, one... Read more »
At the third and final presidential debate on Monday, Governor Mitt Romney backed off claims he made in the previous debate to go hard on China. But as New Yorker's Evan Osnos notes, "But in China, to be frank, nobody takes it all that seriously. Romney’s tack toward the middle in his final debate (a theme that my colleague John Cassidy explores in his post today) seemed to foreshadow to a Chinese audience the kind of softening that is consistent with a pattern that has run through three decades of American foreign policy: candidates who rail against China on the stump rarely follow through if they win, because China stops being a convenient foil and becomes instead a complicated reality."
China’s fascination with the pole dance extends to competitive pole dancing as well: three females and one male are traveling to Zurich, Switzerland to compete in the World Pole Dance competition on November 10. The Chinese contestants are listed on World Pole Dance’s website as Cao Haijing, Meng Yifan, Song Xuemei, and Yan Shaoxuan, all of... Read more »
Much hubbub surrounded 19-year-old weightlifter Zulfiya Chinshanlo’s gold-medal win in London this summer, as it wasn’t exactly clear which country she was actually from, Kazakhstan or China. Both nations claimed her — “Chinshanlo’s Olympic page cites her birthplace as Almaty, Kazakhstan, and claims she speaks both Russian and Kazakh,” according to The Atlantic, while Xinhua stated (paraphrased by CNN)... Read more »
Ultimate Surrender is a website featuring “competitive female sexual wrestling,” and in bold font on its frontpage, it notes that it is “for adults only.” NSFW, if you need it spelled out for you. Not safe for an ostensible news organization, then. Xinhua either does not know this or does not care, because on the... Read more »
