By Mo Zhixu, published: June 4, 2013 By all means, the student movement in the spring of 1989, from its emergence to its development, was a surprise. It started with the sudden death of Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦), the reform-minded CCP General Secretary who had recently been taken down by Deng Xiaoping, China’s real ruler at the time. It escalated wh [...] Keep reading »

By Chang Tieh Chi A rebuttal to some Mainlanders’ tendency to romanticize Chiang Ching-kuo in the discussion of Taiwan’s transition to a democracy in late 1980s. Chang Tieh Chi (張鐵志) is a Taiwanese commentator on politics and music and authors of multiple books. He’s currently the editor-in-chief of City Magazine in Hong Kong.   P [...] Keep reading »

By Gao Yu, published: May 16, 2013 Walk through the recent ideology bugle call that accumulated in CCP General Office’s Document No. 9 in late April, and observe the mindset of Chinese leaders and their frantic effort to take control of public expression, with Beijing-based independent journalist and commentator Gao Yu. The “5 Nos” (五 [...] Keep reading »

This past week was, by any measure, an interesting week in China. Last Saturday, May 4th, Chengdu residents planned, after days of online mobilization, to have a “stroll” in a downtown area protesting an oil refinery and petrochemical plant known as the PX project to be built in Pengzhou, about 30 kilometers away from the city. People worried a [...] Keep reading »

By Qing Lang, translated by Jack Qing Lang (晴朗) is a commentator for Radio Free Asia’s Cantonese service. You can read the original here. Whether or not the Ya’an earthquake was a man-made disaster, whether or not the Three Gorges Dam influenced Sichuan’s geological structure, these are not questions that a short commentary is able to ans [...] Keep reading »

By Song Zhibiao, published: April 28, 2013   Recently, the standing vice-director of Shaanxi provincial propaganda department Ren Xianliang (任贤良) published an article entitled How the Party Should Manage the Media in the New Era in which he evaluated the present media circumstances (China Media Project has a roundup about Ren Xianliang� [...] Keep reading »

Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning film Django Unchained was slated to open in Chinese theaters on April 11, and Tarantino was reported to have edited the film himself so as to satisfy the Chinese censors. And obviously he succeeded. At the last minute though on Thursday, Chinese authorities ordered the movie to be pulled from theaters, and the o [...] Keep reading »

“A longer, more pessimistic outlook [than the Economist’s special report on China’s internet].“ – the author By Mo Zhixu, published: April 6, 2013   On March 28, the General Office of the State Council issued a “Notice about the Division of Labor in Implementing ‘the Plan for the State Council’s Institutional Reform and [...] Keep reading »

By Teng Biao, translated by Rogier Creemers Teng Biao (滕彪) is a well-known legal scholar and rights lawyer in China. Read the original here.   Even in Robinson’s world of one man, his life required information, reflection and memory. Human society not having information is even more impossible to imagine. It may be said that a person [...] Keep reading »