I recently went to Zhengzhou, capital of central Henan province to see Gao Yaojie, the irrepressible, unthinkingly courageous AIDs campaigner. I’ll be writing a longer piece later but I thought I’d post to say she is in pretty good shape and reasonable spirits, considering. She also has been free from the direct house arrest she had …

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote piece in the magazine and several posts on this blog about the case of Xiang Xiang, the captive-bred panda who was returned to the wild as part of a supposed effort at reintroducing bears bred in captivity pandas into the wild. We talked to Zhang Hemin, director of the …

Last Friday, June 1, was “Children’s Day” in China, which means among other things that kids get to put on some kind of show for parents. The theme at my daughter’s school was an Olympic-y, one world, one dream kind of thing. (This is, as I’ve written before, a Chinese school, not an “international school” for ex pats.) …

Here’s a brief and very telling follow-up to the story about the advertisement in support of the Tiananmen Mothers that appeared in a Chengdu newspaper. The ad apparently made it through because the person who paid for it told the paper’s young advertising clerk that June 4 was the date of a “mining disaster,” the South China Morning …

That’s what we have been. Blocked. Great Fire Wall-ed. Or Net nanny-ized. Or, as some Chinese netizens say in reference to their President’s most famous slogan, “harmonized” (被和谐的), which has an authentically creepy Orwellian ring to it….or maybe it wounds more like “neuralized” from the Men in Black movie, which …

I mentioned in my previous post that Hong Kong is the only place in China that allows public ceremonies for the June 4, 1989 killings. But over the past couple days there have also been some memorials on the mainland. They are very small in scale, but given the obstacles that must be overcome to discuss the topic there they are all worth …

Mike Clarke / AFP / Getty Images

Hong Kongers, as they have every year since 1989, gathered tonight to recall the demonstrators who were killed in Beijing. The memorial is focused on the events of 18 years ago and yet remains symbol of the city’s larger relationship with China. This is the only place in the country where people can …

“The true warrior dares to stare the sadness of life in the face and to see the blood that drips there.”
Lu Xun, 1926 (as quoted by Perry Link and Andrew Nathan in “The Tiananmen Papers”)

In the early morning hours of April 18, 1989, thousands of students hung a white banner on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, in the …

Charlie Cole

For those of you who complained that my headline in the post on the Greenpeace global warming report was misleading and unfair, I take your point and have changed the head. Thanks for pointing it out.

Just when you thought nothing perpetrated by the administration of George W. Bush could surprise any more, another instance of unbelievably reckless behavior comes along. This time it’s to do with China and Taiwan and involves the small matter of nearly provoking a nuclear war. A report in the Congressional Quarterly, which closely …

A protest against a planned chemical plant in Xiamen on June 1st would have been unremarkable anywhere else. It is exactly the kind of not-in-my-backyard issue that rouses up even the most complacent citizens around the world. But the fact that it took place in China after a campaign of protest on the web and through SMS messages, is …

Here’s a strong sign that Chinese regulators are under pressure due to the current food safety scandals: they’re blaming the press. “Recently, some media, actually quite a few, have wantonly reported on the so-called lack of safety of Chinese food products,” said an official with China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, …