Last week I wrote about the way endearing child stars such as the seven-year-old Berna are being mobilized as a method for securing the future of Uyghur ways of knowing and speaking. Yet Uyghur “mother tongue fever” has a long legacy. The famous Uyghur poem Ana Til, or “Mother Tongue,” was composed by the poet Haji Qutluq Shewqi in the mid-19th century when a love of Uyghur was directed in opposition to the dominance of Persian and Arabic in Uyghur education. While the vectors of linguistic force have found new centers of gravity in the past few decades...
Bad calls happen in sports, we all know, but rarely does a team react like this.
In the finals of the women's rugby sevens competition at the 12th Chinese National Games on Tuesday in Shenyang, Liaoning province, Beijing went down two early unconverted tries, 10-0, against Shandong. Early in the second half, a Beijing player was shown a yellow card and sent off. While she was on the bench, Shandong scored another try -- though on a controversial play...
Is there any need for Xi Jinping, the president of China, to have an Instagram account?
Signs say no, but as recently discovered by Commentary Made in China, here is @XiJinpingOfficial, an Instagram account that sure looks a lot like something a person from Xi Jinping's office would manage.
In an interesting turn of events, the Beijing Independent Film Festival concluded on Saturday without further interference from local authorities. Despite opening-day warnings that suggested cancellation was a distinct possibility, the festival continued to screen films every day at the Li Xianting Film Fund's office courtyard in Songzhuang Art District.
Sometime after 9 pm on July 18, Linzhou police officer Guo Zengxi, off-duty and on a night-long bender, stumbled outside a KTV building, snatched a 7-month old infant out of an unfamiliar couple’s hands, raised her over his head, and slammed her into the ground. The young girl, named Yueyue, lost consciousness before being rushed to the hospital, then spent days in intensive care with multiple skull fractures.
Whatever happens in the privacy of one's home is apparently not always private, especially if you're a notorious rabblerouser with 12 million followers on Sina Weibo.
Chinese American Charles Xue, aka Xue Biqun (and Xue Manzi on Weibo, an anti-trafficking and environmental adovcate), was captured in Beijing last Friday for soliciting a 22-year-old prostitute. That's hardly the end of the story though. In the past week, authorities have gleefully smeared him in public, including on, it seems, every CCTV news broadcast, emphasizing Xue's confession and his love for sex parties. LOCK HIM WITH THE PEDOPHILES!
Here's some spazzoid computer music this week from Stockholm producer Covox, in fervid anticipation of his set at Dada this Saturday night. He's back in town for the ten-year anniversary of Shanshui Records, local producer Sulumi's platform for bananascore electronica music of local, international, and galactic origins.
As has been well documented in discussions of the cultural situation in Xinjiang, many minority people in Xinjiang feel the future of their language and culture is insecure. Efforts to replace Uyghur-medium education begun in 2004 have intensified as the capillary spread of Chinese capitalism embeds its network and ideology deeper and deeper into southern Xinjiang.
In 2008, Christoph Rehage walked more than 4,500 kilometers through China, grew a beard, and made an incredible video that made it to No. 8 on Time.com's list of top viral videos of 2009. It was called "The Longest Way."
Rehage's follow-up, "The Longest Way 2.0 - Back to Xinjiang," is just as stunningly good. Released two weeks ago on Vimeo, it details Rehage's 865-kilometer "summer stroll" from Urumqi to Khorgas, featuring footage from 2010 to 2012.
This week marks the return of Laowai Comics! (Here was our intrepid artist's most recent work). His newest piece will appear on Monday on his site, and he'll resume his Thursday postings here next week. Until then, check out the full archives.
