|
Danwei Picks
Stories of a changing BeijingPosted by Joel Martinsen, June 10, 2008 9:39 AM
Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China). Review of 'Last Days of Old Beijing': Jeffrey Wasserstrom writing in Newsweek: Michael Meyer's impressive new book, 'The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed' goes a long way toward illuminating some of the scenes that have come to symbolize early-21st-century China, at least before the unrest in Tibet and the Sichuan earthquake. They include wrecking balls knocking down beloved small businesses; schoolchildren dragging their migrant-worker parents, who have never been in a restaurant, into a KFC; human-powered vehicles in a land of high-rises, evoked by the canopied pedicab set against construction cranes...
China on Monday promulgated the regulation on reconstruction after the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake. It was the first of its kind in the country, specially for a single massive quake, which led the reconstruction work into a legal orbit.
"It is illegal to take photos over China, or in Chinese airports."
I've seen shameless, but I've never seen this shameless. People kiss butt, but that's to stay on the boss' good side. Yu Qiuyu this super butt-kisser extraordinaire, like your average race traitor from back in the day, has squeezed out a few alligator tears and shouted to the people: knock it off, the imperial army still means well for you.
Every kind of natural disaster can be found in the oracle bones of the Yin ruins, such as: droughts, floods, earthquakes, windstorms, thunder storms, locust plagues, also solar eclipses and lunar eclipses, because the Shang people also saw these astronomical phenomena as natural disasters. If we say that the oracle bone inscriptions are the source of the Chinese people's characters, then we can say that anxiety about natural disasters is one of the motive forces behind the coming into being of Chinese characters.
It also occurs to me that few westerners know the subtleties and nuance surrounding the participating parties in the CR. I once did an informal poll among writers I workshop with on what they thought of the Red Guards, and the answers were pretty much uniform with the representative one being "pretty much the same as the Hitler Youth." This is quite baffling and at the same time very interesting. As we know (I'm aware of the pitfall of generalization) Americans hate the communist government of China; but did they know the biggest thing the Red Guards did was to break China's state apparatus? Should a communist hater applaud or condemn that? There is just no simple black-and-white answer.
There are currently 0 Comments for Stories of a changing Beijing.
|
Partner Links
Jobs in China
Recent Comments
chengdude on
Blockages
Joel Marti on
Chengdu bus fire blamed on 62-year-old suicidal gambler
vivian on
Bound feet in China
Sajid on
China first police blog
China Media Timeline
Major media events over the last three decades
Danwei Model Workers
![]() Recommended blogs and new media
Books on China
Foreign journalists in China, from the Opium Wars to Mao : Paul French, author of a book on Carl Crow has written a book about the lives and exploits of foreign journalists reporting from China from the 1820s to 1949.
Earnshaw Books' Tales of Old Peking: Tales from Old Peking is available from Earnshaw Books, and like its sister, Tales from Old Shanghai is a book of fragments of information about periods, events or places in Beijing's history, collaging together pictures and text about eunuchs, concubines, the Lama Temple, Opium Wars, art, emperors, and a miscellany of other interesting topics
Henry F. Pringle's "Bridge House Survivor": Pringle was imprisoned by Japanese forces from October 1942 to August 1945, and Bridge House Survivor, available from Earnshaw Books, is his harrowing account of torture under the Japanese.
Front Page of the Day
A different newspaper every weekday
From the Vault
Classic Danwei posts
+ A short interview with Muzi Mei (2004.02): Danwei interviews Muzi Mei + CCTV vs. classic movies (2006.03): A rundown of several pastiches of Chinese movies appearing online as 大史记 - "The Year That Was". Some from CCTV, others not. With links to video. + Street hawker cries of Beijing (2006.12): Yang Changhe demonstrates hawker's cries in a video shot by Muzimei.
Danwei Archives
Danwei Feeds
Via Feedsky
or Feedburner |





