Saturday, 17. March 2007, 01:37:23
Activism, Sexuality, Civil Society, China Watch
by Joel Martinsen
Danwei.org
March 14, 2007Phoenix TV will begin broadcasting a matchmaking program on its website beginning in April. The program, based in Beijing, will be aimed at homosexuals on the Chinese mainland, and will reportedly feature an openly gay host.
Here are two translations of news reports on the program, contributed to Danwei by Bartek Turczynski, the author of the Polish blog
Sinodrom:Chiny -
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Friday, 9. March 2007, 11:40:52
China Watch, Media Control, Public Media
By Yang Hengjun (杨恒均)
EastSouthWestNorth
2007.2.23Original Article in Chinese 我的出版社(演讲稿)(In translation)
Let me tell you about my experience. From when I was very young, I wanted to be a writer. One can say that was my dream. Everybody knew that it was an unbounded glory to be a writer. All the people in China had given their bodies and souls to the Party and Chairman Mao. Old Mao also used his little red book, four or five natioanl newspapers and eight model operas to achieve the unprecedented and unrepeated: he tamed the most difficult group of human thinkers into uniformity.
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Tuesday, 27. February 2007, 23:51:15
China Watch, Book Review
Raymond Soong
EastSouthWestNorth
27 Feb 2007When General Administration of Press and Publications deputy director Wu Shulin allegedly announced that eight books were banned, they became compulsory reading material within the intellectual circles of China. There was no better publicity and endorsement, and one has to read all eight books in order to be au courant. One of these books Ruyan@SARS.com is being published in Hong Kong, and this edition features a foreword by Zhang Yihe (whose own Past Stories of Peking Opera Stars was also on that list of eight books). This makes a good example of cross-promotion and co-branding, except the friendship between the two authors goes way back before the current incident.
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Sunday, 25. February 2007, 07:33:49
China Watch
Deyan Sudjic
Shanghai Conference
Urban AgeDeyan Sudjic is the Architectural Critic of the Observer Newspaper and co-chair of the Urban Age Advisory BoardFifty years ago Shanghai was an island of floodlit art deco cinemas, modern skyscrapers and electric trams, marooned in the midst of a China that had hardly changed in a thousand years. As the city petered out on the road to Nanjing, the neon signs and the street lights disappeared into the darkness of a medieval night. To drive across the city in those days, you needed three different driving licenses to negotiate your way from the Chung Hwa Road to what was then called the Boulevard des Deux Republiques, to Edward VII Avenue and Broadway. You could have worshipped in your choice of onion domed Russian Orthodox churches, the product of the army of White Russian refugees who sailed out of Vladivostock with the Bolsheviks at their heels. It's a history that suggests a city shaped by a mix of pragmatism, opportunism and anarchy. Shanghai was China's window on the world, its most industrially advanced and commercially sophisticated city. And it still is, even as Beijing is working hard to re-establish pre-eminence with a building programme in the capital that is just as frenetic as Shanghai's. Shanghai's decision to hold an Expo in 2010 is its own response to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
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Sunday, 25. February 2007, 07:29:08
China Watch
Shanghai Conference
Urban AgeQuotes“ In recent years urban China has been economically overheated, statistically exuberant and visually disturbing. Those who try to understand it as a blueprint of the globally expanding capitalist economy however, will not be able to comprehend what is happening in contemporary China. Much of the contemporary Chinese city is still determined by fundamental principles set in place in the 1950s and 1960s, the early years of the socialist system. The Shanghai of today reflects these principles: it is a centrally-controlled city with mandatory planning procedures and at least a minimum level of social welfare but it also has a “street administration” where strong local units monitor the actions and happenings in the neighbourhood as much as they act as entrepreneurial units with their own economic resources to generate revenues. The informal housing rental market has grown because the overall market has grown and no monitoring system was deemed necessary to regulate it. I would argue, perhaps controversially, that in China we do not need “public space” as such because Chinese people do not need a space to be designated as such to be able to do public things. In summary, contemporary Chinese urbanism is not based on the individualistic freedom of capitalism but rather on a system of effective cooperation. Even at the risk of sounding politically backward, I would suggest that we can put people together and find an agent that is intelligent enough to plan our cities scientifically, rather than be led by the aggregation of individual desires focused on acquiring and occupying bigger and bigger spaces, wider and wider ocean or park views and more and more happiness. ”
Qingyun Ma, MADA Architects
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Saturday, 17. February 2007, 20:31:50
China Watch, Environment
By Clifford Coonan
The Independent
06 February 2007The world's largest building project is a revolutionary eco-city of electric cars and zero emissions near ShanghaiWang Enming pauses as he emerges from the subway in Dongtan to listen to the sound of flocks of birds settling on the wetlands near the metro station, undisturbed by man as they prepare for a winter migration. Cycling the remaining three minutes home to his apartment, he marvels again at the fresh breeze coming off the mighty Yangtze river, which is never cleaner than at this point at the world's first eco-city near Shanghai.
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Wednesday, 24. January 2007, 01:06:27
Human Rights, Politics, China Watch
In Search of Acceptable Cooperation
China's leaders want to foster civil society, and control it
By Berthold Kuhn
Magazine for Development And Cooperation
07/2006Professor Dr. Berthold Kuhn is currently working at the NGO Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Beijing. His post is subsidised by the Centre for International Migration and Development (CIM) in Frankfurt. email: berthold.kuhn@t-online.deThe Chinese government is experimenting at several different levels – by encouraging partnerships between the State and independent agencies for instance, and by tolerating unregistered organisations. It is difficult to predict whether official recognition of rights will follow next. However, international cooperation can have a positive influence.Read more...
Tuesday, 23. January 2007, 23:22:15
Politics, China Watch
By Ellen Huang
East Asian History Program
University of California, San DiegoIn seeking to understand Chinese history, scholars such as Joan Judge and Mary Rankin have chosen to focus on the nature of the Chinese “state” or “society.” Indeed, the theme of state-society relations has been especially prominent among Western scholars in their attempt to adopt a “China-centered” historiographic approach. Rejecting the “response to the West” paradigm, which posited an unchanging, stagnant China prior to the influence of the West, historians of China found “long-term structural processes more intellectually interesting than the short-term effects of foreign [West] contact” (Kuhn, 1991:2, quoted in Wakeman, 1993). Yet, regardless of whether a study pivoted on endogenous change in China or Western impact, the underlying assumption behind all such studies was that, with the Communist revolution, China had somehow failed at every step to evolve into a free and democratic nation. Thus, scholars strove to find in China and Chinese history instances of an incipient “society” exercising power or resisting the “state,” borrowing such terms as public sphere, civil society, or bourgeoisie from European social theory to describe these social precursors to democratic formation.
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Tuesday, 16. January 2007, 04:02:41
Politics, China Watch
By Anne F. Thurston
United States Institute of PeaceAnne F. Thurston is an independent scholar and China specialist whose recent work has focused on the social consequences of China’s economic reforms and on problems of grassroots democratization. Since 1978, she has spent more than five years living and researching in China. Her books include The Private Life of Chairman Mao (a collaboration with Mao Zedong’s personal physician); A Chinese Odyssey: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident; and Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of China’s Intellectuals during the Great Cultural Revolution.ContentsSummary
Foreword
Introduction
Muddling toward Democracy: Rural Sichuan Province, November 1995
The Roots of Political Reform in China’s Villages
The Varieties of Village Self-Governance
The Requisites for Success
The U.S. Responses to Chinese Political Reform
Notes
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Monday, 15. January 2007, 23:52:58
Politics, China Watch
Roland Soong
ESWN
2007-01-09The following essay was excerpted from the foreword to the book of the same name and published in Beijing Daily News on October 23, 2006. The essay has since then been discussed widely inside and outside of China. The essay is featured on the front page of this week's Asia Weekly (Yazhou Zhoukan) with a photo of the author. The author Yu Keping is the deputy director of the Central Translation Bureau and is a member of the thinktank for the Hu-Wen administration.
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