Featured Article
How China got its name, and what Chinese call the country (October 5, 2016, South China Morning Post)
During periods when the Chinese nation was unified under one ruling house, the name of the dynasty was also the name of the nation, thus “the Great Tang”, “the Great Qing” and so on. The same principle applied when China was divided, with individual states, great or otherwise, bearing their own names. However, several names have been used to represent the idea of an integral geographic and cultural nation, the most famous one being Zhongguo (“the Middle Kingdom”).
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2016年10月6日
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Video: China’s Quest for Scientific Glory and Aliens (September 27, 2016, The Guardian)
China’s new radio telescope, the largest in the world—and the latest marker of Beijing’s ambition to become a global player in science—began its search for signals from distant galaxies on Sunday.
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2016年9月29日
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Being Christian in China's Jerusalem (September 18, 2016, BBC)
Danny Vincent travels to Wenzhou to meet Pastor Zhang, an illegal pastor in one of the thousands of underground churches that serve the millions of Chinese Christians. However, he also meets a pastor from a government registered church who defends the crosses being taken down and how he says the real reasons that crosses are demolished is because they are illegally built and not because the Chinese government is so concerned about the meteoric rise in the faith.
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2016年9月22日
That was a stupid idea — until we thought of it: The cultural phenomenon of squatting toilets, split pants and giant hickeys (September 11, 2016, The Culture Blend)
Maybe, the most prominent recent example of “it was stupid until we thought of it” has been brought to us by 23 time gold medalist Michael Phelps (and numerous other Olympians who jumped on the cupping train). He taught us in Rio that gigantic hickeys aren’t always a bad thing.
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2016年9月15日
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Shariah With Chinese Characteristics: A Scholar Looks at the Muslim Hui (September 6, 2016, The New York Times)
Mr. Erie’s recently published book, “China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law,” is a look at how Shariah — Islamic law and ethics — is implemented among the Hui. In an interview he discussed his findings, which confound many preconceptions about Shariah, Chinese law and the rigidity of the Communist state.
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2016年9月8日
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China: When the Cats Rule (August 26, 2016, New York Review of Books)
But it’s in Cat Country that Lao She stretches himself the furthest, producing one of the most remarkable, perplexing, and prophetic novels of modern China. On one level it is a work of science fiction—a visit to a country of cat-like people on Mars—that lampoons 1930s China. On a deeper level, the work predicts the terror and violence of the early Communist era and the chaos and brutality that led to Lao She’s death at the Lake of Great Peace. Cat Country is often called a dystopian novel, but when Lao She took his own life, it was an uncannily accurate portrait of the reality around him.
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2016年9月1日
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Cradle of Tofu (August 18, 2016, The World of Chinese)
With the possible exceptions of rice and dumplings, few foods seem as intrinsically tied to Chinese culture as tofu. But despite its widespread popularity throughout China and vegetarians everywhere, the origins of this food remain shrouded in mysteries of Chinese kings obsessed with finding an elixir for immortality.
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2016年8月25日
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Why China’s Cities Must Maintain Ties With the Countryside (August 16, 2016, Sixth Tone)
Urbanization normally refers to the movement of rural populations toward a city. But Shanghai and other Chinese cities serve as evidence that urbanization is often much more complicated. In essence, it’s about change of lifestyle. The divide between rural and urban is more obvious in China than it is in any Western country.
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2016年8月18日
Featured Article
Why Won’t China Stop Moaning About the Rio Olympics? (August 9, 2015, Sixth Tone)
There were only two ways of concealing this embarrassment. The first was to admit that China had overemphasized the importance of the Olympics — that what we had treasured was just average in everyone else’s eyes. Obviously, we couldn’t do this: we would look foolish. The other was to moan about everyone else, making them the fools instead. Hosting the Olympics is an honor: we treated them with respect, and so should you.
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2016年8月11日
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The unprecedented aging crisis that’s about to hit China (August 1, 2016, PBS Newshour)
China has the largest Baby Boom generation in the world. But now just years away from a mass retirement, that country is headed toward a severe workforce crisis and retirement cost cash crunch. Due to the country’s one-child policy from 1978 until 2015, the younger generation poised to take over is relatively small. What’s the solution?
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2016年8月4日
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In Search of a Place to Die (July 21, 2016, Sixth Tone)
According to Li, the Chinese fear death so much that they’d prefer to run away from it rather than have to think about it at all. In the case of palliative care, cultural taboos related to death also play a significant role. Take, for example, the quintessentially Chinese concept of filial piety: Children who want to be seen to “do the right thing” for their ailing parents will reject palliative care and insist on more aggressive treatment, trying to preserve life at all costs.
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2016年7月28日
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Why China is probably never getting Pokemon Go (July 18, 2016, Tech in Asia)
Pokemon Go, although it’s not available in China, is already making people nervous. A popular Weibo conspiracy theory goes that the entire game is a US-Japanese plot to GPS map China and determine the locations of Chinese military bases to facilitate quick strikes if a war ever breaks out. That’s ludicrous, of course, but Chinese authorities probably are concerned about the game, although no one has yet said as much publicly.
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2016年7月21日