Okay I realize it’s been awhile since I posted, but I’ve been in a bit of a coma — a coma created by Ma Jian. His latest novel Beijing Coma is what did it.
The book is about the events in the building to that June day in 1989, and told through the memories of a protester, Da Wei, who was shot in the head and is in a coma as the novel begins. His memories narrate the story of how he got to his present state.
Sounds interesting right? Wrong. It’s heavily political and reads more like a political history textbook. I’m a fan of Ma Jian and I loved …
Neocha, China’s premier online creative community, has just released the third album on its Netlabel: Tomorrow’s Afternoon Tea / 明天的下午茶.
You may remember a post a while back where we interviewed Neocho CEO Sean Leow, and talked about their awesome NEXT player, which streams indie Chinese music for free.
The new album contains 10 tracks loaded with the syrupy sweet sounds of some of China’s best female indie vocalists. And, get this, it’s 100% free! You can download the entire album from this link [38 MB zip file].
When China shifted its view on food subsidies this week, it was considered a major about face for a country that has been open to free trade for the last 30 years.
According to writer Naomi Klein in the conclusion of her book The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, this turn is happening because China and its people are recovering from the “economic shock therapy” that the government put the people through since certain event in June 1989.
Klein says that the government used this event to push through some of the most anti-citizen-styled economic policies which were just recently corrected by the country’s new labour …
I have to say that I was really surprised when I opened up a Sara Bongiorni’s A Year Without Made in China – the story about one family’s attempt to boycott Chinese products for all of 2005 — there wasn’t much about China in it.
The book is subtitled “One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy” but it isn’t really about globalization either. The book is a story about commitment China and globalization are just background players. Nowhere is this more true than looking at Bongiorni’s knowledge of China. She keeps talking about Chinese factories as sweatshops but makes no attempt to examine major retailers’ supply chains other than to call companies and ask if the product came …
For the last month or so I’ve been really stressed out at work. When I get into a state like that I tend to look for books that help giving me a new perspective on the situation. That’s how I found Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, the story of Ximen Nao, a landlord from Shandong province who is executed by the Communists on New Year’s
Day 1950 and spends the next 50 years being reincarnated as a series of different animals as he attempts to redeem himself and make his way back …
Since it’s the May Labour Day holiday in China this week, lots of Chinese are out traveling, and since I hate crowds I am not. What I did spend my first day of the three day holiday doing was finishing up Rob Gifford’s great book China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Bloomsbury Publishing).
Gifford’s book isn’t your typical story about China’s rise. There isn’t a lot about Shanghai and there isn’t really anything about Beijing in the book. Gifford, who was National Public Radio’s Beijing correspondent from 1999 to 2005, decided that right before he left China he …
Managing the Dragon provides very good insights into what was needed in the 90s to bring a successful fund into China to build a world-class Chinese automotive components company.
The author, Jack Perkowski, started out as a successful Wall Street investment banker. After twenty years, he took an interest in China and moved his family, where he focused on raising funds to build a Chinese automotive components manufacturer, ASIMCO.
When he went to China in the early 90s, the Chinese government …
Well maybe he wasn’t the only inspiration for British uberspy James Bond, but Peter Fleming certainly was one crazy laowai.
Peter Fleming was the older brother of Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming and one of the best known travel writers of 1930s England. A very rich adventure writer, the Flemings came from an important banking family and Peter was considered so “posh” that he was unable to get a job at the BBC because he had too much of an upper-crust British accent. Fleming first became famous for a book he wrote called Brazilian Adventure about his trip across Brazil to find the lost expedition of Col. Percy Fawcett.
After the success of Brazilian …
For all those Chinese parents looking to get their kids into Harvard or Yale, they should take their noses out of those how-to-books writen by parents of successful students and instead read the biography of one of their countrymen. Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (China Economic Review Publishing) is the biography of China’s first graduate from Yale — way back in 1854.
But Yung isn’t a guy to just rest on the merits of his college degree. This is a guy who was at the center of many of the major events in China in the 19th century — both through contacts and luck. …
When I got an e-mail a few months back from book publisher DK to see if I was interested in reviewing their new book, “China: People Place Culture History
“, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I had, wrongly, assumed that the book would simply be a token collection of pages about the Middle Kingdom. However, what came in the mail was a massive tome full of eclectic photos and information, as its title suggest, about the country’s people, geography, culture and history.
The absolutely beautifully bound book features stunning photography by Christopher Pillitz capturing China from a number of different angles …
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