Eat your heart out, Jack Kerouac; wanderlust has found its way to modern China. On November 14, a 27-year-old woman from the coastal city of Ningbo made headlines in a local newspaper after coming back from a four-month tour around China. The article describes how she spent 14,000 RMB (about US$2,200) on the whole trip; [...]
Freedom of speech has always been a sensitive topic in China. But when a prominent commentator calls for the right to free speech in one of the most famous (and state-controlled) universities in China, it raises the stakes yet further. On November 18, fresh off of a forced blogging hiatus coinciding with China’s leadership handover [...]
The below article also appeared in ChinaFile, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. Speech on the Chinese Internet, it seems, is beginning to thaw once more following the country’s leadership transition. After months of speculation, new Chinese leader Xi Jinping was announced on November 15 at the close of the 18th Party Congress, which accompanied a [...]
The term “middle class,” once a foreign concept in an impoverished China, is now used more than ever to describe an emerging power. Helen Wang, author of The Chinese Dream, has estimated that the Chinese middle class has already grown to more than 300 million people. That’s about 25% of the Chinese population—and almost the [...]
It is a truth universally acknowledged in China that a single woman in her 20s—who has just gotten a job after graduating—must be in need of a boyfriend, i.e. a future husband. This is an inviolable belief firmly fixed in the minds of traditional Chinese families. And the boyfriend, of which we speak, must be of [...]
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