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Category Archives: China

No, we will not forget

Nothing happens in this video. It’s just a candle tonight in Beijing.

The other massacre of 1989

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 […]

Dispatch from Pyongyang: Xinhua’s sense of humor?

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 […]

No commie homo-lovers, please

It’s nearly a week since the Oscars, but my computer’s been at the shop for an upgrade. So, anyway, how did CCTV-6 translate the first main sentence of Sean Penn’s acceptance speech?

Given the many failings of my translations on this blog, I need to be careful about throwing too many stones inside my glass house. […]

Blogger stabbed in Beijing

(Update: The word is that the attackers have now been caught. Some details known, others not yet clear.
Update 2: One of them was indeed caught and will now stand trial.
Update 3: The attacker has been convicted and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.)
Big-name Chinese blogger Xu Lai, better known as ProState in […]

The Big Boot burns - now you see it, now you don’t

See Update Below.
(And see Sun Bin for eyewitness account (and now video); also Shanghaist, Danwei and ChinaSMACK. If you want to see for yourself exactly how the fire started, check out this excellent series of videos on Youtube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.)
With breaking news, it’s not unusual for […]

When news isn’t news… and then it is

The leaders fight the drought (Xinhua)
When does a drought become news? Droughts aren’t like most other kinds of disaster. They don’t usually happen overnight. They’re not like the brief dusting of snow that brought Britain’s quaint transport system to a grinding halt for a day - and then melted as quickly as it came. That […]

Religious freedom in China

Uploaded to Flickr by musicoooool.

Lotus Temple (Lianhua Si) in Tongnan County, Chongqing

(h/t Prostate in Flames)

How to tell if your 100 yuan note is fake

There’s been loads of news lately about fake 100 yuan notes that are supposedly so good that they’re almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The People’s Bank of China has repeatedly said that this is not true and pointed out a number of ways to tell a real note from a fake one. Photographs […]

A school with three children

A short photo-essay from Xinhua:
A four-person school
January 13 was the last of day of Autumn semester for primary schools in Rongshui county in Guangxi. At Siliutun school, Donghua village, Rongshui town, only one teacher and three pupils entered the final preparation for the end-of-term exam. Siliutun is a mountain village with 60 households. After third […]