This fuckface. This fucking piece of shit is the new frog-eyed creepy rapist avatar for every foreign English teacher in China. I fucking hate him. As a reformed Catholic, I reserve vast reservoirs of contempt and genuine vitriol for authority figures who abuse their power at the expense of children. With all of my private and professional life force, I hate the bastard, hopes he gets a life sentence and di ...

A mere two days after 21 were killed in violent attacks in Bachu county, Kashgar, including six police and six ethnic Uighurs, Beijing has politicized the incident, using it to call out the United States for failing to condemn the attacks as "terrorism." Reuters: But the U.S. State Department on Wednesday merely expressed regret at the loss of life and urged China to "provide all Chinese citizens, including ...

Just about anyone not holding a select diplomatic or South Korean passport can travel to North Korea. All it takes is money, which you give to a tour agency. They'll even take you to the countryside if that's what you're after. It's only the hucksters who try to dress up their North Korean trip as an accomplishment, pretending it involved wile or subterfuge, not to mention danger. When a reporter does it -- ...

Anne Ishii, writer/translator in New York, writing in Slate: Martin Luther King Jr. said... Please stop. ...we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin, but no one said anything about what's in our pants. Oh fuck. There is an unspeakable fallacy that all Asian-American men must decide early in their adulthood to acknowledge or not, one that concerns their manhood. Call ...

The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television is a yawning cunt of beigest ninnies and bacillus. It's written right there in its mission statement: Our function is to research and promote the insipid, hackneyed humdrum of popular media while bowdlerizing, inside the abysmal recess of our cave of stupefaction, all that is good, interesting, real, or artful. ...

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: ...

More than a few journalists and observers have averred the significance of the Southern Weekly "incident," but the actual story has appeared to fall short of their expectations. As I wrote two days ago, "But is this really a watershed moment for media rights in China, as some hope... or will we return to our jobs soon and let the more vested parties enter negotiations on the future of both Tuo Zhen and Sout ...

Bad articles deserve to die a silent, lonely death. Really bad articles, however, deserve to be thrown into the public stocks and ridiculed. This one from Daily Mail belongs with the latter. It begins: Ravaged by hunger and desperate for food, these are the sad pictures which show just how needy families in China are. Oh yes, look at these people ravaged by hunger... ...desperate for food... ...and... smili ...

Chen Kegui, nephew of blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, was sentenced to 39 months in jail for his role in fighting back hired thugs and local officials who had broken into his home on April 27. The man slashed three officials -- out of a group of about 20 of the most spineless, chicken-livered, piss-poor excuses of human beings -- who had, among other things, upset Chen's feverish six-year-old child, and for t ...

By TAR Nation The flagship CPC newspaper People’s Daily is, well, it’s a bit, you know. It’s rubbish. The design is terrible, the editorials are as pleasant as a shirt of broken glass and Captain Crunch, they have military equipment on their flash home page every day and their non-CPC related stories have the detached insouciance of a disabled child petting a kitten too hard. But they’re still good for a la ...

By TAR Nation The Party Congress is, mercifully, over. For those of us here in Beijing, it feels good, like a massive cold-water colon cleanse. Now with the brown-nosers out of the city, we can reflect. Now that it’s over, I mourn the loss of the banners. The propaganda rags had a few different roles to play during the Congress. 1) Don’t report bad news. 2) Make sure everyone loves the Congress. 3) Love our ...

The Bayi Rockets are the crown franchise of the Chinese Basketball Association, not because they're good -- they won 31 percent of their games last year -- or particularly likable -- as Jim Yardley wrote in Grantland after Bayi brawled with Georgetown last year, "Anti-Bayi sentiment [at one time] was so deep that rumors began to circulate of counter conspiracies in which other teams were colluding, delibera ...

If there's anyone in China who might understand what it means to parody something -- actually, truly parody, and not just copy or co-opt -- it's Ai Weiwei. He's an artist, you know. Who better than he to skewer China's nouveau riche and be this country's answer to PSY? You think Gangnam, South Korea is a district of gross decadence and put-on fakery? ...

Protesters occupying Hong Kong's city plaza have won -- sort of. Wall Street Journal reports people are feeling "mixed jubilation and frustration" after the city announced yesterday it will make its controversial National Education curriculum "voluntary." While it's too early to unravel all the implications of this decision, a direct result is that those on their hunger strike can now eat. “I am dying for a ...

In the history of censorship in Chinese media, surely we've seen more half-baked decisions and upsetting punishments. But surely, as well, we've never seen so many journalists punished for such small beer. Spare me your sermon about Liu Xiang as the face of the country's athletics program and a national hero, etc.: I'm arguing against the mechanisms that have underpinned this very apotheosis of a talented - ...

In an article published Saturday in the Sydney Morning Herald, South African Cameron van der Burgh admitted to cheating in his world-record-setting swim in the 100-meter breaststroke. Swimmers are only allowed one dolphin kick after entering the water and one kick after the turn, but van der Burgh copped to taking multiple -- because "every swimmer does that," he said. "I’m not willing to sacrifice my perso ...

Journalists are fed a lot of crap by the world. Specifically by public relations flacks and sources, but really, the world at large, because we're surrounded by crap, by fetid logs of horse and other rancid mammalian shit dripping with stupidity and awfulness. It takes a decent journalist to filter that shit and present it in a way that is digestible to a halfway intelligent and educated human being. It mea ...

What the hell did we watch? Why didn't someone help Liu Xiang up? Why was he left hopping around on one foot like an inspirational failure? Liu Xiang was in the sixth heat of the preliminaries in the 110-meter hurdles, and on his first leap his left foot collided with the hurdle, sending him down. He landed awkwardly, tumbled and tumbled, and the CCTV commentators emitted a scream and then went speechless f ...

We're at the point where Ye Shiwen can no longer be found guilty in China, if that makes sense. This issue has become about more than swimming. If it ever does come to light that Ye used a banned substance, I suspect the relevant organs will find a scapegoat who admits that he accidentally put an illegal substance in her food or something, and no one -- not the media, the Chinese swim officials, the million ...

First of all, it's eight minutes. Say what you want about "Survival," London's official Olympics song, but at least Muse had the courtesy to stop at a reasonable five minutes and 20 seconds. For what is essentially an overproduced, commercialized ditty, what couldn't you possibly do in five minutes that you need eight? Actually, we know the answer: you couldn't squeeze in “more than 100 singers and movie st ...