Chen Guangcheng, a blind villager who learned law while moonlighting as a masseur, had already changed China. Now, some believe he may change the world by precipitating a diplomatic crisis. On April 28th, word got out that Mr. Chen, a self-taught lawyer who fought for the rights of the disabled and dispossessed, only to be [...]
Are men without money no better than garbage? Many Chinese women seem to think so, at least in this video. With that opening salvo, the battle of the sexes is well and truly on as men accuse women of materialism and women blame men for lack of ambition – a microcosm of modern China’s relationship [...]
High value target in China slips past tight security cordon and makes way to U.S. embassy in dramatic escape. Sound familiar? No, not Wang Lijun redux. This time it’s Chen Guangcheng (陈光诚), a celebrated human rights lawyer in China who has slipped the bonds of his extra-legal detention in Shandong province and allegedly made his [...]
On February 9th, Wuhan Evening News published a story entitled “Young Mother Nurses 6-month Baby Into Cerebral Palsy,” that described a distraught mother who turned to infant formula to cure her child, based on the advice of a local doctor that her breast milk was the culprit behind her baby’s illness. The newspaper article set [...]
It’s not easy being gay in China. China’s first gay pride week was not held until 2009 in Shanghai, and even then the Christian Science Monitor reported that police discouraged venues from hosting it. A Qingdao University survey of gay men from 2010 found 62% hid their homosexuality. In 2011, LGBT groups boycotted the social-networking [...]
One of the most common shortcomings in U.S. thought on China is overgeneralization, the tendency to see diverse incidents as the concerted actions of a monolithic super state. In the case of Bo Xilai, however, the problem has been the opposite: Numerous ideas without a central theme. The New York Times has focused its coverage on [...]
Aung San Suu Kyi had near unanimous support among Chinese netizens, but could her latest move take that glow away? After over a decade under house arrest, the Burmese opposition party leader (and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) was released in 2010. In that same year, after winning an election that many decried as rigged, the [...]
Photos of a Mao temple in Mianyang, Sichuan Province were posted to Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, by Lin Jie (@林洁), chairman of B.A. Consulting, a real estate service group. The temple was built in 2006, but many users seem to be encountering these photos for the first time, and Lin’s tweet generated more than 4,700 retweets [...]
Shhhh…don’t type that name! “Chongqing” (重庆, which literally means “double celebration”), is currently not searchable on either the Sina or Tencent versions of China’s Twitter-like Weibo platforms. It is searchable on Sohu Weibo, which perhaps merely proves China’s government no longer much cares about Sohu Weibo. For the uninitiated, Chongqing is the city whose Party [...]
A parent’s love knows no bounds. But to keep a son out of jail by trying to bribe the victim of the son’s sexual assault? Is that a part of Chinese culture? As reported on Iowa City Patch, a county attorney in Iowa recently dropped charges of “aggravated misdemeanor for witness tampering” against the parents of Peng Tang, [...]
Richie Rich, eat your heart out. China now has hundreds of thousands of millionaires, which means hundreds of thousands of burgeoning young scions. How do they spend their money? Their time? What are their values? A recent survey, the first of its kind, queried 600 of China’s “second-generation rich” (富二代). The Chinese site eg365.com.cn then transformed [...]
It’s one tragedy after another. After Mianyang, Sichuan suffered in the horrible earthquake of 2008, millions of RMB were donated to rebuild a local school. Now, that school has suffered not from a quake, but from greed. With over 16,000 re-posts since its appearance, its ruined husk is Sina Weibo’s most viral image of May [...]
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