Featured Article​
Scenes From China's Yangtze River Disaster (June 2, 2015, The Atlantic)
A passenger ship named Dongfangzhixing (Eastern Star) carrying 458 people, including 406 Chinese passengers, 5 travel agency workers and 47 crew members, sank on Monday night in the Jianli section of the Yangtze River in China. According to officials 15 people have been rescued with hundreds still missing. The captain and the chief engineer both survived and claimed that the ship sank quickly after being caught in a cyclone. Rescuers fought bad weather on Tuesday as they searched for the missing, many of them elderly Chinese tourists, in one of China's worst shipping disasters in decades.
Joann Pittman
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June 4, 2015
Featured Article
Moscow Patriarchate: China authorises the ordination of Chinese Orthodox priests on its territory (May 19, 2015, Asia News)
Metropolitan Hilarion, the Moscow Patriarchate’s ‘foreign minister’, made the announcement after a visit to China where he met the leaders of the State Administration for Religious Affairs. The first priest should serve in Harbin. Two more ordinations are expected. With a new Cold War as the background, the Moscow-Beijing strategic alliance also has a Church connection with the People's Republic recognising the latter’s 'political' role in Russia.
Joann Pittman
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May 28, 2015
Featured Article
China’s Two-Track Approach to Christianity: Vatican vs. Wenzhou (May 15, 2015, China Brief)
Beijing and the Holy See are ostensibly as close to establishing diplomatic relations as they have been in over 60 years; yet, little has changed for mainland Chinese Christians. As Beijing turns the screws of ideological authority, those advocating for religious freedom must learn to coax the government out of its defensive stance. If successful, it could change the very nature of what it means to be Christian in China.
Joann Pittman
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May 21, 2015
Featured Article
Chinese Province Issues Draft Regulation on Church Crosses (May 8, 2015, The New York Times)
In painstaking detail, the 36-page directive sets out strict guidelines for where and how churches in Zhejiang can display crosses. They must be placed on the facades of buildings, not above them. They must be of a color that blends into the building, not one that stands out. And they must be small: no more than one-tenth the height of the building’s facade.
Joann Pittman
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May 14, 2015
Featured Article
Draft Law: Foreign NGOs Can Open Offices with Approval (May 6, 2015, China Digital Times)
The Foreign NGO Management Law has undergone a second reading by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and will now be reviewed and revised before the third reading. The new draft contains a significant change from the first draft, which said that foreign NGOs were not permitted to open local offices in China under any circumstances. In the new reading, foreign NGOs can open offices but only with explicit permission from the State Council.
Joann Pittman
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May 7, 2015
Featured Article
Viewpoint: Across China by wheelchair (April 26, 2015, BBC)
The good news - discovered whilst looking out of the window on the overnight train to Beijing - is that the vast majority of Chinese cities are flat as a pancake. When carrying a year's worth of backpacking supplies, I like to make a habit of avoiding steep hills wherever possible. As soon as we stepped off the train, however, the good news stopped flowing. Carrying out even the most basic of tasks in a wheelchair in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Xian and Shenzhen felt like I was competing in The Hunger Games.
Joann Pittman
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April 30, 2015
Featured Article
With an Influx of Newcomers, Little Chinatowns Dot a Changing Brooklyn (April 15, 2015, The New York Times)
With Chinese immigrants now the second largest foreign-born group in the city and soon to overtake Dominicans for the top spot, they are reshaping neighborhoods far beyond their traditional enclaves. Nowhere is the rapid growth of the city’s Chinese population more pronounced than in Brooklyn
Joann Pittman
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April 23, 2015
Featured Article
China: What the Uighurs See (April 13, 2015, The New York Review of Books)
Drake has been traveling to Xinjiang since 2007, when she began photographing Central Asia from her base in Istanbul. Over the years, she has come to know the region well, and struggled to break free from its clichés. The summation of her work is Wild Pigeon, an ambitious, beautiful, and crushingly sad book.
Joann Pittman
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April 16, 2015
Featured Article
Ancient Chinese Community Celebrates Its Jewish Roots, and Passover (April 6, 2015, Sinosphere)
In a hotel dining room festooned with purple garlands for a coming wedding, Chinese of Jewish descent in the central city of Kaifeng came together on Friday night for a Seder, the traditional Passover meal over which the Exodus story is recounted. Just two days before Qingming, the “tomb-sweeping” festival when Chinese traditionally pay their respects at family graves, they had gathered to recall ancestors even more ancient and a world away.
Joann Pittman
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April 9, 2015
Featured Article
Born Red: How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao. (April 6 issue, The New Yorker)
Joann Pittman
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April 2, 2015
Featured Article
How a Rock Musician from China Brought Uyghur Food to Boston (March 20, 2015, Munchies)
Payzulla Polat doesn’t want to talk about politics. And who can blame him? If his homeland of Xinjiang—a massive frontier province in northwest China—is ever in the news, it’s for terrorist attacks and human rights violations. He prefers to talk about music and food. The 33-year-old Boston resident is the owner of Uyghur Kitchen, the only Uyghur food truck in America.
Joann Pittman
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March 26, 2015
Featured Article
Hot Pot or Pizza: Chinese Students in the U.S. Aim to Bridge the Cultural Divide (March 18, 2015, China Real Time)
“My ‘Foreign’ Roommate: Muge & Katherine,” is an 11-minute video produced by Ms. Miao and a few other Wisconsin students showing an imaginary but realistic first week in the life of two roommates, one Chinese and one American. The video comes at the right time as the number of Chinese students studying at U.S. universities is increasing. Last year, according to a report from the Institute of International Education, 274,000 Chinese students studied at U.S. colleges, an increase of about 75 percent in the last three years.
Joann Pittman
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March 19, 2015