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Chen Guangcheng Update
Well, well. It isn't every day that a blog post becomes obsolete as soon as it's published, but Wednesday was no ordinary day. Let's consider the latest development in the Chen Guangcheng saga: Liu...
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A Few Thoughts on Yang Rui
On May 16th, the Chinese television personality Yang Rui wrote the following message on his Weibo account (links via Charlie Custer): The Ministry of Public Security is getting rid of foreign trash...
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The Beer Election
In the middle of John Heilemann entertaining feature on the 2012 election, this paragraph stood out: “Romney really, actually thinks that if you just take care of the folks at the top, it’ll trickle...
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Tiananmen, Then and Now
A few days ago marked the 23rd anniversary of the government massacre of unarmed protesters near Beijing's Tiananmen Square. As in past years, Hong Kong residents gathered in Victoria Park for a...
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China and Soft Power
Last night I had the opportunity to attend a talk held at Asia Society between Orville Schell, Roderick MacFarquhar, and Ian Johnson on the future of China's political model. The three men, to put it...
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Urbanization, Growth, and Hukou Reform
Photo by Flickr user "diametrik" under a Creative Commons License. East Asia Forum has a good article outlining why urbanization, in and of itself, won't be enough to drive consumption growth in China....
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Americans In China
There are hundreds of thousands of expatriates who live in China, but the vast majority are there temporarily. There are businessmen there on assignment, students committed for an academic year, Peace...
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Hong Kong and China, 15 Years Later
A friend of mine used to say that the Communist Party slogan about Hong Kong- "one country, two systems"- got it exactly backwards. Hong Kong has a different language, currency, customs , and legal...
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European Boy
There's a photo of myself that makes me cringe whenever I see it. Actually, there are a number of such photos, but there's one in particular that I have in mind. I'm standing on a street in Bologna,...
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The Box
I had been in Kunming for about a month when I first discovered The Box. In those days, it was easy to miss: the bar was wedged in between a restaurant and a juice bar on Wenhua Xiang, Kunming's...
View ArticleAnti-Japanese Protests in China
The current anti-Japanese protests that have engulfed China over the past week aren’t unprecedented, but they do appear to be the most serious in the country since the early 1970s. The proximate cause...
View ArticleSite Re-Design
Visitors, like fish, start to stink after three days, said Benjamin Franklin. Websites may look fresh awhile longer, but after awhile they start to stink, too. With that in mind, I have unveiled the...
View ArticleWhat if the NFL ran China?
I’ve been watching an obscene amount of football recently, trying to make up for all the seasons I lost while in China. (Though to be fair, those years neatly coincided with the 49ers bleak period, so...
View ArticleObama and China
The New York Times has a long piece today documenting the evolution of President Obama’s approach to China. These two paragraphs jumped out at me: America’s eastward shift has left the Chinese deeply...
View ArticleMatt Around Town
I’ve written a short op-ed about Mitt Romney and wealth for The Morningside Post. Have a look!…
View ArticleIs Bo Xilai Next?
A Chinese court sentenced Wang Lijun to 15 years in prison today, which, when you think about it, is a relatively light sentence for a high-ranking official who attempted to defect to the United...
View ArticleToo Many Chinese Students?
The Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of San Francisco School of Management has quit for an unusual reason: there are too many Chinese students there with poor English, so the...
View ArticleWeibo Not Decisive in China- Yet
Amy Qin has an excellent piece at ChinaFile explaining why we shouldn’t think Weibo will be affecting real social change anytime soon. Qin lays out statistics on current internet usage in China: In...
View ArticleHousekeeping Notes
Some recent changes to the site, which is still very much a work-in-progress… I’ve added a section to the top called “recommended reads”, which lists all the China-related blogs and Twitter feeds that...
View ArticleBo Xilai Expelled from the Party
On Monday, I wrote the following regarding the fate of Bo Xilai: Most likely, the Party will wait until after the conclusion of the 18th Party Congress- expected to be held next month- to deal with Bo....
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