Top stories of the week 11/06-11/13
  • Bearing Witness, from That’s Shanghai,  is an interesting collection of memories from Shanghainese octogenarians who recount what life was like many years ago.
  • March of the Freshmen, by Eric Fish (who also writes his own blog, Sinostand), is a great piece looking at military training in Chinese schools. For the story he asked a student to keep a notebook detailing her experiences, and gives a first hand look at a program that many have described as “brainwashing”.
  • What it means to vote in China, an essay by Xu Zhiyong that appeared this week in the Economic Observer. An interesting look at how Chinese Democracy works, and what its current limitations are. One of the more interesting aspects of this article is that it is very much directed at a Chinese audience, and only appears here in translation.
  • China’s lawyers under siege, by Jerome Cohen, summarizes his recent testimony in front of the Congressional-Executive Committee on China in an emergency meeting held on the case of Chen Guangcheng. His three main points are key to understanding the importance of Chen’s case: 1) Lawyers in China are routinely harassed, not only in extreme cases of activism 2) Chen’s detention is not an example of local gov’t abuse, but is endorsed by the central gov’t 3) In Chen’s case there is not even the veneer of legal justification for his detainment.
  • As a a bonus, the University of Michigan discovered that it had a collection of papercuts dating from the Cultural Revolution. Until last week, they had been sitting in storage. Take a few moments to view all 15 of them.

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