Captain Beijing, File011: Smog Chic

CB 11 featured
Captain Beijing is a "comical strip" produced by the People's Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared "Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art." It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

Captain Beijing, File010: Meet The New Boss

CB 10 featured image
Captain Beijing is a “comical strip” produced by the People’s Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared “Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art.” It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

Dispatches From Xinjiang: Ali K.’s “Burial” Photo Series

Ali K Burial photos featured image
Last weekend I went to Gulsay Cemetery at the south end of Ürümchi, back behind the power plants right next to the lowest foothill of the eastern section of Heavenly Mountains. Many Uyghur, Kazakh, and Hui heroes are buried in this cemetery; people often just refer to it as “the Muslim cemetery.” Looking at the markings around you, it feels as though you are in a completely Muslim world. In the Uyghur section of the cemetery all of the signs are only in the Arabic script of modern Uyghur. There is little sign in this community of the dead that we're in the largest Chinese city in Central Asia.

Captain Beijing, File009: Backup

CB 9 featured image
Captain Beijing is a "comical strip" produced by the People's Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared "Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art." It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

Tom Olden’s Crazy, Brilliant Response To Alec Ash’s Book Review

Tom-Olden-Shanghai-Cocktales-video-530x311
Before I saw Tom Olden's video, I heard reactions to it. It was described as a "leap off the deep end" with an "ISIS vibe," featuring a "headless girl in the background chopping carrots on an ironing board... PUA-style 'burns' on manhood, and, of course, that Jigsaw voice." That's crazy, I thought. Does the carrot represent neutered sexuality? Is the headless woman some self-aware avowal of misogyny? And what of the knife, that weapon-turned-tool of domesticity, scything away? Is the video menacing or ironic?

Captain Beijing, File008: Community Outreach

CB 8 featured image
Captain Beijing is a "comical strip" produced by the People's Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared "Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art." It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

Dispatches From Xinjiang: On The First Uyghur Contemporary Art Show

First Uyghur Contemporary Art Exhibition 2
The first Uyghur contemporary art exhibition was launched at Xinjiang Contemporary Art Museum on May 16, attended by several hundred people from across the province, including most of the represented artists. Since the majority of the painters were teachers or professors, many leading administrators from local universities were also present. Aside from them and a few Han painters from local art schools that the museum’s leading curator, Zeng Chunkai, had invited for the opening, nearly everyone was Uyghur. Even a famous Uyghur public intellectual, Yalkun Rozi, came and praised the artists – although he clearly didn’t understand contemporary art.

Captain Beijing, File007: Solicitation

CB 7 featured image
Captain Beijing is a "comical strip" produced by the People's Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared "Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art." It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

Mark Kitto, Back To China Dreaming

Mark Kitto featured image
A year after leaving China and five years after publishing his first book (China Cuckoo: How I Lost a Fortune and Found a Life in China), Mark Kitto has a follow-up, That's China, technically a prequel that traces the beginning of his That's magazine franchise and looks underneath the fingernail of Chinese publishing. Kitto wrote the following column for Prospect, republished here with the author's permission -- with a freshly appended postscript.