Joann Pittman is Vice President of Partnership and China Engagement and editor of ZGBriefs.
Prior to joining ChinaSource, Joann spent 28 years working in China, as an English teacher, language student, program director, and cross-cultural trainer for organizations and businesses engaged in China. She has also taught Chinese at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul (MN), and Chinese Culture and Communication at Wheaton College (IL) and Taylor University (IN).
Joann has a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Northwestern-St. Paul (MN), and an MA in teaching from the University of St. Thomas (MN).
She is the author of Survival Chinese Lessons and The Bells Are Not Silent: Stories of Church Bells in China.
Her personal blog, Outside-In can be found at joannpittman.com, where she writes on China, Minnesota, traveling, and issues related to "living well where you don't belong."
You can find her on Twitter @jkpittman.com and on Facebook at @authorjoannpittman.
She makes her home in New Brighton, Minnesota.
When I first went to China, I was bombarded with many odd (to me anyway) questions: can you use chopsticks? How much money do you make? Why do American parents kick their children out of the house at age 18? On and on they went.
But I'll never forget the time a student asked me, "What's the difference between Catholic and Christian?"
中国基督徒使用互联网的自由度，其实要比一般的估计较高。本文作者缕述网民数目，信徒网址及连结的网页等，将个中三昧为读者娓娓道来。
Today we are starting a new feature, linking this blog with another of our publications, the ZGBriefs Newsletter. Every Friday, we will highlight articles from the ZGBriefs newsletter that we consider the "must read" articles of the week.
Last weekend I had the privilege of attending the 25th National Catholic China Conference at Loyola University in Chicago. The United States Catholic China Conference sponsored the conference and the theme was "The American Catholic Church and China in an Era of Globalization."
Last week I had the privilege of attending a consultation on education in China, co-hosted by ChinaSource. Below are some random gleanings from a day of note-taking:
After a summer of confusion, China's new visa regulations went into effect on September 1st. New visa categories have been added and requirements for some existing categories have been changed.
This is a common question that folks who live and work in China are asked. I often reply that I feel very safe in China, except when I'm crossing a street or hurtling through town in a taxi being driven by a sleepy driver.
However, a perusal of recent stories out of China in recent months might give the impression of peril at every turn: stabbings in Beijing and Shenzhen by mentally deranged individuals; a man trying to blow himself up at the Beijing airport. Add to these the seemingly never-ending list of food safety scandals: contaminated milk powder; fake mutton, beef, and honey; glow-in-the-dark pork; and thousands of dead pigs floating in the river in Shanghai.
The Chinese have a saying: "shang you zhengce, xia you duice." A fairly literal translation is "the top adopts measures and the bottom adopts counter-measures. A more colloquial way of putting it is "the leaders make the policies and the people find a way around them."
For the past few months I have had the song "California Dreaming'" stuck in my head. I blame Chinese president Xi Jinping and his propagation of the notion of a "Chinese Dream."
On April 15, 2 home-made bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring dozens. One of those killed was 23-year old Lu Lingzi, a graduate student at Boston University. She and her friend were waiting near the finish line when the bombs exploded.
In June of 2012, ChinaSource launched a blog called Chinese Church Voices where we have been posting translations of content taken from Mainland Christian online sources websites, blogs, and micro-blogs. Our goal is to help give outsiders a chance to "listen in on the conversations" that Chinese Christians are having online.
I recently went back through the articles that we have posted to see if there were any observable trends. Here's what I noticed (with links):
Misconceptions abound regarding what the Constitution of the People's Republic of China has to say about religion. The government trumpets the fact that the freedom of religious belief is enshrined in the Constitution. And we often hear about the constitution forbidding the teaching of religion to those under 18.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what the constitution has to say about religion and religious freedom.