Poor Economics and China’s 128 million people living in poverty
While China has raised hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty in the last 60 years, there are still 128 million people living on less that $1 per day (World Bank defines poverty as...
View ArticleSome of the best Chinese short fiction (in English)
In the run up to the London Book Fair focused on Chinese literature, the Guardian is publishing a great series of short fiction works from some of the best authors in China (there are a few works left...
View ArticleYin-Yang: American Perspectives on Living in China – Book Review
A few months ago I reviewed Yes China! by Neil Clark, and when a friend asked me to review another book about teaching English in China I was a little hesitant to commit to reading what to me has...
View ArticleMao’s Great Famine couldn’t happen again (but June 4th could)
I recently finished reading Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe by Frank Dikötter, which outlines the full scope of horror that was the Great Leap Forward which in...
View ArticleDream of Ding Village – Book Review
Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke is the Man Asian Literary Prize nominated story of a small village in Henan as it is ravaged by the AIDS epidemic that spread through central China nearly a decade...
View ArticleReading Campaign: Ai Weiwei’s Blog
Seeing Red in China is kicking off a reading campaign the likes of which are not generally braved by blogs. We, and hopefully most of our readers, are very dedicated to the difficult task of making...
View ArticleAi Weiwei, Art with Chinese Characteristics, and the need for both Unity and...
Picking up from where Hannah left off yesterday, I want to look at a couple ideas from Ai Weiwei’s essays that jumped out at me. Chinese Contemporary in Dilemma and Transition Ai’s essays provide a...
View ArticleDon’t read too much into the Olympics and other practical advice from Ai Weiwei
Today, we continue our ongoing series on Ai Weiwei’s book, Time and place. A World Without Honor By 2006 China had already tapped Zhang Yimou to direct the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. To...
View ArticleThe Honest Truth About Dishonesty and how it shapes corruption in China
I recently finished Dan Ariely’s book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, and realized that I’ve been thinking about corruption in the wrong way. While I’m not about to argue that there are “acceptable...
View ArticleEverything you wanted to know about sex in China, but were afraid to ask
When I heard that Richard Burger, of The Peking Duck, had written a book about sex in China, I expected it to be a somewhat scandalous introduction to the topic (he had told me that it wasn’t meant for...
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