I never thought I’d be grateful to George Bush and Tony Blair for anything. But there is just one thing I could thank them for. It was the struggle against their illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 that brought me together with some of the extraordinary people who were my friends in Beijing, without whom […]
Monday, February 22, 2010
A whole lot of people must have been smoking too many fireworks during the Spring Festival holidays. Newspapers and TV stations all over the place have been chattering with great excitement about President Hu Jintao’s supposedly genuine People’s Daily microblog. (A few examples in Chinese; and some more in English).
In his profile, “Hu Jintao” describes […]
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
I never knew Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi. I had their old sofa but that doesn’t really count, does it? They died ten years apart, almost to the day: November 18, 1999 and November 23, 2009.
Yang Xianyi died a month after I left China. Gladys died the year I arrived. Back then I was working […]
Half of it seems to have ended up on my window. How close is that building that wasn’t there a few months ago? This close:
There isn’t much light in my living room anymore. Good job I’m moving, really.
Translated from a blog post by 27-year-old Uighur photographer Kuerbanjiang Saimaiti during the National Day holiday:
The people of Xinjiang are “welcome” throughout the country
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Yesterday I arrived here in Shenyang for the first time, and for the first time experienced the “warm” hospitality of the people of Shenyang. Because of this “warmth” I […]
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Ai Weiwei’s surgery in Munich apparently went smoothly - two holes drilled in his head on Tuesday (or Monday evening?) to remove 30 ml of fluid from his skull. He says the pressure in his head has gone and so has the pain.
He’d been suffering from headaches since police burst into his hotel room in […]
Monday, September 14, 2009
There’s nothing new about the use of hypodermic needles to threaten and rob people. It happens all over the world. What is unusual is for an entire city like Urumqi to be gripped by fear, with hundreds of people claiming to have been stabbed, and rumors swirling about separatists deliberately spreading AIDS.
But this is not […]
Monday, September 7, 2009
I originally planned to post this months ago, but other things got in the way and I forgot all about it.
It was just after 11 o’clock one night in April and there was nothing happening at work so I popped out to the shop. I was just starting to cross the road near the Millennium […]
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
On the first day of term, Southern Metropolis Daily asked primary school children in Guangzhou what they want to be when they grow up. Here are some of the answers:
(After much head scratching) “I don’t know”
“A photographer”
“A painter”
“A pilot”
“A fireman, because firemen can help people put out fires”
And then there was this girl:
“I want to […]
I haven’t got the slightest idea if Rem Koolhaas was or wasn’t thinking of genitalia when he designed the new CCTV building.
Likewise, no one has ever proved that church doors were built with the same thing in mind.
And I certainly wouldn’t dream of suggesting anything about the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle […]