Since it's the end of the year, we decided to jump on the "Top Posts" bandwagon that is careening through the blogosphere. However, since each ZGBriefs post includes dozens of stories, we are highlighting here the top ten most clicked links of the year in other words, your favorite stories.
What do Christmas, the one-child policy, and high end art collecting have in common? They are all subjects of the articles we selected as among the most interesting for this week.
Top stories from this week's ZG Briefs
From Chen Guangcheng and the American culture wars to a village that is still living Mao's dream, our top stories this week are quite diverse.
The two big stories that came out of China this week were China's announced "adjustments" to its infamous one-child policy and the upcoming departure of US Ambassador Gary Locke.
Most of the news out of China this week was political, as the Third Plenum wrapped up their meeting in Beijing and issued their long-awaited communiqu. Details are still emerging and analysts are still trying to figure it all out. In this week's ZGBriefs, we included a special section with links to nine different articles. They are all helpful preliminary takes on the meeting.
A remarkable article appeared in the Global Times (the English-language mouthpiece of the authoritative People's Daily) on October 10 that openly acknowledged the division between China's official Three Self Church and the unofficial church and suggested that the authorities are trying to bridge the gap between official and underground believers that has seemed irreconcilable for a generation.
My top picks for this week fall into two broad categories: English teaching and violence. The articles about English teaching were of interest to me because once upon a time I was an English teacher in China. The articles on violence are interesting and sober reads and help us understand that underneath the veneer of stability, there are some serious social tensions.
My top picks from this week's ZG Briefs .
Four of my top picks this week have to do with the Chinese language and language learning.
With over 800 million Han Chinese in China (and over 1.2 billion in China as a whole, including minorities), it's one thing for a church or mission group to "adopt" or "engage" the Han - and another to figure out what that means. This is the situation of many groups in the world that are huge in size. "Who to adopt" can be addressed by websites like the Joshua Project. But "where to go" requires a different approach.
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.