A reminder of Beijing’s reluctance to deal with China’s recent past…and how shopping can be dangerous for you. Actress Cameron Diaz (famous in part using for peculiar hair gel in There’s something About Mary) had to apologize to Peruvians after she was spotted at the famous Machu Picchu ruins carrying a army-style olivegreen handbag …
Asia
Out Of It
I will, in all likelihood, grab and shake hard by the shoulders the next person who refers to themselves as being out here. I mean, Hong Kong is one of the world’s largest financial centers, and a densely packed city in what is probably the most populous province of the most populous nation on earth, but you’ll still find middle …
China’s Food Cops and “The Wire”
Last night I was catching up on some old episodes of “The Wire,” the fabulous HBO drama about a sprawling drug investigation in New York Baltimore. One reminded me so much of the latest news on food safety in China that it seemed worth pointing out. Yesterday the official China Daily ran a story about an investigation that led to the …
Conversations With My Mother
If you want an idea of the success with which the Communist Party is inspiring a sense of Chinese nationalism, speak to my mother, who is ethnically Chinese but holds British, Irish and Australian passports. “I love the Communists,” she declared over a glass of rosé last Saturday night. “The Chinese were despised by everyone. Now …
China Learns How to Lose Friends
The latest Pew Global Attitudes survey is out, and it has some interesting numbers on China. The perception of China is still mostly positive, but the high support the country has enjoyed in recent years is softening. While majorities in most of the nations surveyed still say China’s economic influence is positive, there are doubts about …
Looking For Harmony in Hong Kong
When it comes to performance reviews, timing is important. So when Hong Kong’s chief executive spoke in Beijing today about Hong Kong residents “giving more importance to social harmony,” he wasn’t completely exaggerating. Things are now pretty smooth, especially when compared with the turbulence of 2003. That was the year Hong Kong was …
“Once You’ve Been Bitten by a Snake, You’re Afraid Even of a Piece of Rope…”
This is an interesting essay on the op ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal by Jerome Cohen, one of the US’s foremost experts on the Chinese legal system. It’s on the legacy of the vicious “anti-rightist” campaign in China which occurred 50 years ago. The themes of the so called “rightists” (academics, writers and other …
Tough Times For China’s Dissidents
Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty
Wu Lihong at work
According to conventional wisdom, the approach of the Olympics was supposed to have been a time when conditions got easier for dissidents/activists in China as Beijing tried to show its best face to the world. But as Amnesty reports (here’s the link but forget it if you are in China), …
Chinese Media Regulation: One Step Forward, Half a Step Back
China’s National People’s Congress is debating a law that would regulate media coverage of emergencies. The debate (China Daily report here) over the law allows an intriguing glimpse of the struggle the Communist Party is going through as it tries to adapt to the change economic growth and opening have brought. A previous version of the …
The “Roof of the World” Gets Warmer…
A recently published piece from the Worldwatch Institute’s China Watch Report on global warming’s impact on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. A little tendentious (ie, pay no attention to that small underdeveloped country over in the corner that this year will become the world’s largest emitter of CO2 gases, it’s all the fault of the …
Slave Labor and Kidnap: It Only Gets worse
The 400 fathers hunting for their kidnapped children have written a second letter of appeal (here’s the China Daily story). You may recall that the first letter was posted on a popular internet forum and almost singlehanded served to spark the current crackdown, which has so far seen almost 600 workers freed and 160 people arrested. What …
Kidnap and Slavery, Part II
For those interested, we have a piece here on the significance of the child labor/slavery furor.
Tigers and Morality
China Photos / Getty
Fried or Braised?
This post is from Ross Bloom, an summer intern in the Time Beijing bureau. Ross, who is an undergraduate at Harvard studying Chinese among other things, was doing some research on the tiger parts trade:
China’s 5000 strong captive tiger population has gotten quite a bit of press this week.
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