Saturday, August 15, 2009
Entrance to the Juyuan Hotel on Majiabao Road, Beijing
Last week’s edition of Southern Weekly (Aug. 6) carried an extraordinarily rare article on a subject that is usually off-limits for the mainstream media in China: the “black jails” that operate outside of the law in Beijing, detaining people who have committed no crime and have simply […]
ABC News:
We arrived at one of Urumqi’s biggest mosques with about 80 journalists in a convoy of about six or seven mini-vans.
Almost every journalist still left in Urumqi was there, because there was almost no violence on the streets. There’s very little else left to cover.
NO, NO, NO! There’s a huge amount left to […]
(WARNING: Some of the content of this post is not suitable for young readers. If you are under the age of 18, please go here immediately and download the Green Dam censorship software which should prevent your computer from being able to open this page ever again.)
When I started writing this, Google.com was blocked in […]
This year is the 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties between China and Russia, at least that’s what Chinese and Russian leaders keep telling us whenever they get together. It’s a load of bollocks. Sixty years ago, the People’s Republic of China established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union ceased to exist in […]
Looking through Green Dam’s list of Falun Gong related vocabulary is quite a surreal experience. (See Danwei and ESWN). It begins, predictably, with dozens of FLG terms and the special police unit in charge of suppressing the cult. But if you grab the cursor on the right of the screen, scroll down and stop at […]
A long time ago, a friend’s student from Jiangxi complained that you never saw individual clouds in Beijing. The sky was always uniformly blue or, far more often, a single sheet of grey. I’d never noticed this before but it was one of those facts that, once pointed out, is just obviously true. I may […]
With apologies to the BBC, CNN, Sammy Kaye, Beijing’s paramilitary police… well, everyone, really.
The Umbrella Men of Tiananmen @ Yahoo! Video
Somehow I didn’t think Youku would pass this one. The picture quality didn’t work too well on Yahoo. It looks slightly better on Youtube, if you’re not in China (but Youtube’s banned it for copyright […]
Nothing happens in this video. It’s just a candle tonight in Beijing.
Of memory and forgetting
Drive east from Algiers and eventually the road will carry you up through the mountains and valleys of Kabylie. From the city of Tizi Ouzou, continue to climb into the villages where children stop and stare at a rare Arab visitor, just as Chinese villagers stare at Europeans they have seen in […]
Double Happiness: women dance on election day in Pyongyang (Xinhua photo)
Sunday was a day of extraordinary happiness for North Korean women. Not only was it International Women’s Day, it was also election day so they could exercise their right to cast their compulsory vote in favor of a single candidate to represent them in the […]