Today the People’s daily ran a story gushing over an upcoming release of the complete works of Lei Feng nearly 50 years after his death. In the West though it is widely accepted as fact that Lei was little more than an invented character who served the Party’s propaganda needs, and is a reminder of the days before Mao’s cultural r [...] Keep reading »

China has the highest rate of female suicide in the world, and one of the highest rates overall. While it’s not the most pleasant topic, understanding traditional ideas about suicide is critical to understanding why headlines like, “Worker suicides prompt probe,” appear so frequently. In the traditional Chinese understanding of th [...] Keep reading »

I’ve been working on transcribing the diary of a missionary doctor who lived in Hefei (then called Lu Chow Fu) around the turn of the century. This passage, written by the doctor’s wife, struck me as particularly interesting for several reasons. Firstly, by the sheer number of people the doctor and his two assistants were able to treat [...] Keep reading »

I came across a blog post yesterday that compares Weibo and Twitter, and the conclusion is that Weibo is not international and its power to promote change is limited. To that I will add that Weibo is really a glass house where it feels like you are free but you keep hitting the walls all the time. It is also becoming a mirror of the twisted world t [...] Keep reading »

By Yaxue Cao   Xi Jinping (习近平), the vice president of China and heir-apparent of the Communist regime, was in town to visit on Tuesday, Valentine’s Day. Protesters gathered in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. I went too, with a Chen Guangcheng sign I had made the night before. Of the diverse groups there, the Tib [...] Keep reading »

This article was written by a Chinese friend in Chengdu who is passionate about the protection of animals. The first time I heard about the House of Love (爱之家, aizhijia) was on Christmas Day, 2008. I was giving a lecture on animal rights in western countries during my last period of the semester. One of the students came to me after class, sa [...] Keep reading »

Clark Nielsen came to China with no training and no clue how to be an English teacher, Yes China! An English Teacher’s Love-Hate Relationship with a Foreign Country ($13.45 paperback, $5.99 Kindle) is the enjoyable record of what happened next. The majority of the book focuses on his experiences in a variety of classroom settings and his fa [...] Keep reading »

As my wife, whom I love very much, reminds me from time to time, I assume too often that the readers of the blog actually know me. I hope this post helps you better understand where I am coming from as you read about the China that I know. From time to time readers of the blog ask whether or not I even like living in China. They say things like, &# [...] Keep reading »

Over the past few days I’ve received emails from long-time readers of the blog telling me to “stay safe” after publishing Ge Xun’s account of his detention. In the past I would have said that for the most part, China deports troublesome foreigners and is content with keeping them outside of its borders and labeling them as & [...] Keep reading »