Author Zhang Lijia attended in March the Bookworm International Literary Festival, and talked about the changing role of women in China´s society. Here is the report of Al Jazeera. Zhang Lijia is currently writing a novel on prostitutes in China.Read More →
Slowly, very slowly, some good news about China´s environment is coming in. Journalist Ian Johnson talked for the New York Times with Mark Clifford, author of The Greening of Asia, about the changes in the world´s largest coal consuming country.Read More →
Baidu, China´s largest search engine, has launched an initiative to rebuild Nepal virtually, in 360 degrees using the many existing pictures of destroyed sites. Communication director Kaiser Kuo explains on his Facebook page how it works, and how tourists´pictures will be used.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson describes his friend and colleague Peter Hessler for The New York Review of Books, and analyses his often controversial take on China. For example his take on dissidents in China. ” Hessler’s four books have sold 385,000 copies in the US, a figure that easily makes him the most influential popular writer on China in decades.”Read More →
Paul French, author of the Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation (China in the 21st Century) summarizes for The Guardian what the government has done over the past decade to fight obesity. He is underwhelmed.Read More →
The environmental documentary “Under the Dome” by Chai Jing has become more influential, even after Chna´s censors banned it from the internet. Not only because between 100 and 200 million already watched the documentary, says author Zhang Lijia to Bloomberg. The government can no longer brainwash the people.Read More →
A reasonable price and still a premium, those are the assets of the iPhone 6 as a key gift for Chinese New Year business analyst Shaun Rein notes at CNBC. “The anti-corruption drive is more serious than most analysts realize,” said Rein.Read More →
Religion is making a comeback in China. But the position of Daoism, the fifth of the larger religions in China, is rather unclear, as it is hard to trace than other religious, explains journalist Ian Johnson to PRI. What is the place of Daoism in today´s China? From a transcribed phone interview.
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Officially gender discrimination is banned, but until recently that law was not enforced. That is changing now women take the offenders to court, and get their legal rights, writes author Zhang Lijia on her weblog. She discusses the cases of Huang Rong and Cao Ju.Read More →
President Xi Jinping anti-corruption drive has opened a new front as land sales by local governments are surveyed by the central government, notes financial analyst Sara Hsu in TripleCrisis, and she applauds the move. Much of the social unrest in the past years has been caused by those transaction, where citizens often lost from greedy officials.Read More →
Unlike many other large cities, China has been avoiding the establishment of large slums and related instability, argues author Jeremy Wallace in an interview with journalist Ian Johnson at the New York Times. The abolishment of the hukou system is not expected any time soon, since it serves the government well.Read More →
Capital punishment is declining in China, although the country still executes more than the rest of the world combines. Author Zhang Lijia paints in the New York Times the struggle of daring lawyers who fight for their clients, and the slow success of their campaign. Read More →