Several days ago, the state-run People’s Daily ran a piece entitled “The Post-80′s Generation is Dispirited: Early Decline Cause for Alarm,” arguing that while China’s youth born after 1980 have far and away better material conditions than their forbearers, they face “spiritual confusion and a loss of identity.” The piece concludes by noting that a [...]
On May 8, the Japanese government announced it would honor the 1995 war apology, a decision widely interpreted as a diplomatic gesture aimed at smoothing ties with China. Tensions between the two countries have recently escalated due to events such as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s suggesting a possible revision of the 1995 apology, key cabinet [...]
At the entrance of Gongjian Hutong in Beijing sat a short thin man who walked with a limp and wore a blue, one-piece jump suit. He lived in a one-room metal shack with a clear sliding door and fixed bikes for a living, with a large shelf of tools next to his bed. He gossiped [...]
Welcome to Tea Time Chat, a real-time discussion between Tea Leaf Nation writers about the issues that matter to them. With graduation day approaching at many universities, we took the opportunity to contributors who have attended Chinese universities to discuss their experiences there. This follows a Chat last week in which we asked Chinese students at elite American universities [...]
A rare protest in Beijing involving hundreds of people was documented by photos posted on China’s social media (scroll down to see photos). The cause of the protest was the death of a 22-year old migrant worker, who fell several stories from an apparels wholesale market building in Beijing on May 3. The police declared [...]
Rat meat + gelatin + red food coloring + nitrates = lamb. Have you tried it yet? “This is what a ‘complete’ sheep looks like,” reads a caption under the photoshopped image of a sheep with Jerry from Tom and Jerry as its head. The image was posted by @无锡微生活, an account that focuses on [...]
Welcome to TLN’s inaugural Tea Time Chat, a real-time discussion between Tea Leaf Nation writers about the issues that matter to them. In this Chat, we have asked Chinese students at elite American universities to explain why they chose to attend U.S. schools over their Chinese counterparts. *** Xiaoying Zhou is a student at Yale [...]
Model United Nations, a popular college- and high school-level extracurricular activity in the U.S. and Europe, has come to China. Students play delegates to simulated UN committees and compete for “best delegate” awards. This activity took root in China when the first collegiate MUN team was formed at the elite Peking University (PKU) in 2000. More collegiate MUN clubs [...]
Is this another sign of the coming of the “China Century?” The Schwarzman Scholars Program, backed by Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and launched at Tsinghua University in Beijing on April 21, might have the potential to become as prestigious as the Rhodes Scholarship one day. In 1902, six years after the death of Cecil John [...]
On April 16, 2013, while the attention of the world and the U.S. media was gripped by the Boston Marathon bombings, the Chinese news outlets and social media were captured by horrors of another kind: Huang Yang, a medical science graduate student at Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, was poisoned to death, and the prime suspect [...]
Until recently, Chen Tao (@陈涛哥在成都) worked at Alibaba, a Chinese Internet company, as an in-house censor deleting inappropriate postings. Now, he drives six hours every weekend from his home in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, up into the mountains to the north of the city to purchase wild mushrooms, free range eggs and organic honey. Chen [...]
This article also appears on the Atlantic, a Tea Leaf Nation partner site. A newly released survey conducted by the Ministry of Culture in Taiwan reports that the Taiwanese read only two books a year on average. While the well-known Chinese adage “with just one book, a man is never poor” offered some comfort to [...]
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