My review of a doc film on overseas Chinese living in Beijing
Read MoreDescription of a night at the popular hip-hop club in Wudaokou, Beijing, called Propaganda
Read MoreOne of my projects while in Beijing is to research and experience the city’s notorious “underground” live music scene. The scene is not that underground really--for several years now clubs have been operating in the open, featuring gritty Chinese rock bands. One such club is 2Kolegas, which opened up two years ago. Run by veteran rocker Liu Miao 刘淼 and his partner , the club is located beyond the Third Ring Road on Liangmaqiao Street. It’s in a Drive-in Movie Theater Park. The area of its location is parkland--meaning field and forest. The club itself is small, and patrons can sit outside on a dirt-grass field and drink their beers while enjoying the (cough, splutter) clear Beijing night air.
Read MoreIf you want to see a slice of the Shanghai high life, go to Muse on a Friday night.
Read MoreLast night a dinner engagement with an old friend fell through and my wife had her own dinner plans with former colleagues, leaving me in the city center with two hours of empty time--a precious commodity in Shanghai. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the Shanghai nightscape. From Xintiandi 新天地, where my wife and I had gone to have a cup of coffee, I strolled into the darkening evening, heading Bundward.
Read MoreOne of the highlights of my week was seeing the play “Under a Shanghai Roof” 上海屋檐下, written by the famous playwright Xia Yan 夏衍 （1900－1995). Xia Yan, ne Shen 沈乃熙， was born in the Zhejiang city of Hangzhou. He took part in the May Fourth demonstrations in 1919 and traveled to Japan in 1920 to study, where like so many other young idealistic Chinese students, he was introduced to Marxist theory. He joined the Guomindang in 1924 and after the “failed revolution” of 1927 he entered the Communist Party.
Read MoreI read the news today oh boy…wait, I didn’t have to read the news, because I’m here. In China, at last! After several months of beta testing, this site finally goes LIVE. Yes, folks, I’ll be here for the next several months, your roving reporter of the CHINA SCENE. Though I’ll be busy the next few months, especially after the Dartmouth FSP program kicks off this September, I fully intend to keep posting my impressions and reflections on what’s going down in the P R of C as it revs up for the OLYMPICS.
Read MoreIt recently came to my attention that Wei Hui's novel Shanghai Baby has been made into a film, starring Bai Ling as "Coco", the novel's protagonist. Meanwhile, Rachel Dewoskin has turned her own non-fictional account of her stint as an actress in a 1990s popular Chinese TV series, Foreign Babes in Beijing into a film as well. Interesting that both stories are being produced as films around the same time and that they both deal with female sexuality in China during the same era. In one, Chinese women appear seductive, Western men are virile while Chinese men are weak. In the other, Western women are attracted to virile, artsy Chinese men. What a telling juxtaposition! I'll get back to this theme at the end of this blog, but first, for those of you unfamiliar, here's a rundown of both stories.
Read MoreDS: Andy, I would like to thank you for linking to our program at the Carnegie Council, our online magazine Policy Innovations, and our blog Fairer Globalization. I would like to take up your invitation to respond to your skepticism about whether a better, more equitable world can be reached.
SJ: You know me, Devin, always the skeptic. So what does it take?
Read MoreRecently the Asiatimes published an article on a Korean journalist who wrote a rather unfriendly blog about the lack of public manners in China. The blog elicited a range of comments from other Koreans, many of whom felt that the blogger was being unduly racist towards his Chinese brethren.
This is a discussion that most of us involved in the China field have been having for years and that will continually resurface. It always seems to come down to this: "the Chinese have private hospitality and personal warmth but lack public consciousness, while Westerners and Japanese have public consciousness but lack private hospitality and personal warmth."
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