Love her or hate her, Empress Dowager Cixi does not leave us with the option of just letting her drift off into historical obscurity. Jung Chang's (author of Wild Swans) recently published Express Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China is destined to become a must read for China hands.
Tomorrow (April 5) is "Tomb-Sweeping Day," a festival to honor the ancestors by tending their graves. There were two articles about this that caught our attention this week.
Adding to my recent list of Ten Books on Christianity, I'd like to also commend the three volumes of Salt and Light: Lives of Faith that Shaped Modern China, by Carol Lee Hamrin and Stacey Bieler.
A house church in Beijing has a special time of prayer for Kazakhstan.
Two articles about religion, a missing jetliner, and eye-popping gifs of China's urbanization; these are our top picks this week.
Scrolling down through ZGBriefs this week provides another glimpse of the complexity of China today.
A few years ago, I put together a China reading list that I titled "My Literary Journey to Being a Sinophile" for my personal blog in which I highlighted books that have shaped my understanding and love for China over the past thirty years. The book topics run the gamut from history to contemporary society to the condition of the church. The book Safely Home (2003) by Randy Alcorn is not on the list.
Meetings (and things that happened alongside those meetings) and Chinese people in the US caught our interest this week.
Many people are surprised to know that that there are numerous Christian books that have been published in China and as a result can be legally sold and distributed within China. This is something that has been going on for the past ten years.
Violence was very much in China-related media this week as people inside and outside of China sought to come to grips with the brutal attack that took place in the Kunming train station on March 1. A new date, 3-01 has entered our terrorism vocabulary.
My top picks this week center on architecture, education, and the plight of the disabled in China.
Chinese language learning opportunities have mushroomed in recent decades. For those seeking to work specifically with the church in China, however it is still not easy to find a program that covers both the requisite theological vocabulary and is accessible to non-native speakers.