Asia

On Friday, Jan. 16, the Asia Society will host a daylong symposium in New York on the effect of climate change on the Tibetan plateau. A live video webcast will be available at asiasociety.org. You can also catch a collection of videos on the topic at the society’s China Green site.

My friend Tim Johnson who is the Beijing correspondent for Mcclatchy newspapers and also writes one of the most consistently interesting English-language blogs on China has a scary post today on the explosion in rabies cases in China. Travelers to rural areas (and big cities too, where the danger is actually worse but treatment more …

State-run China Central Television responded sharply to the call for a boycott of its programing, telling the Associated Press that its coverage is “timely and sufficient.” As slogans go, it’s not quite “all the news that’s fit to print” or even “fair and balanced.” The AP notes that CCTV’s faxed response, from Wang Jianhong, deputy …

For people who don’t live in Beijing, the preoccupation with the quality of the city’s air that plagues some residents must seem occasionally to veer into monomania. Last year, I had to consciously stop myself from posting on the issue and putting up endless photos of just how awful the view out my window was. It’s worth coming back to …

It’s a bad time for media. Advertising revenue is weak, circulations are falling and nobody wants to pay for news online. But there is a glimmer of hope in China. Or at least in China’s state-run media. As the South China Morning Post reports today, the government is considering a proposal to invest $6.5 billion in expanding the global …

Hong Kong’s environment will never be saved so long as there are groups like the curiously named Greeners Action. This wretched organization probably thinks it is helping with its latest campaign when all it has done is redefine uselessness. It has launched an initiative that will see diners rebated an enticing 12 cents (12 cents!) if …

Recently we reported on the arrest of dissident intellectual Liu Xiaobo and police interviews with dozens of other signatories of Charter 08, the pro-democracy manifesto released during a period of sensitive anniversaries last month. The number of mainland scholars, artists and writers who have been questioned by authorities about the …

Gu Gu, of course. As AFP phrases it, “A Beijing Zoo panda known for his bad temper has tasted human blood for the third time.”

From Lin Yang, who spent New Year’s on the road:

Not everyone is having a hard time during the financial crisis. Over the New Year’s holiday, I took my dad on a road trip to visit our old hometown in Ningxia, where the temperature was 5°F. Having spent twenty years in the bleak mountains of that region in northwest China, my dad was

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I have written in the past (and, it now seems, over optimistically) about how China’s economy is different and why that might help it weather the current crisis better than some other countries. One reason is its unique hybrid economy that mixes rigid state control with wild west free market capitalism. The central government control in …

My neighbor Jeremiah Jenne has a post on his Jottings from the Granite Studio blog today about the death of China scholar and linguist John DeFrancis. DeFrancis is well known for the popular Chinese language textbooks and dictionaries he compiled. When I hear his name I go back to Chinese 101, as in “Please turn to page 70 of your …