China has a longstanding tradition of rewriting and even recreating its own past. The current regime is not different, writes journalist Ian Johnson in the Guardian and he meticulously analyses the complicated relationship between the Communist Party and its history.Read More →
New England shoe company New Balance is suing a competitor in Guangzhou for using its brand name. The case does not lead anywhere for the US company, and business analyst Shaun Rein explains in Fortune why legal action sometimes can be counterproductive in China. Fighting for China to change might not work.Read More →
While China was watching the 2008 Olympic Games, its academics were engaged in another heroic struggle to save what can be the Chinese equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Journalist Ian Johnson describes for the New York Review of Books that struggle, and the efforts to make sense out of them. A few snippets.Read More →
Sales of living Chinese artists at auctions dropped with almost half in 2015, reports the Hurun Art List 2016 this week. Causes: a slowing economy and the anti-corruption drive, tells Hurun chairman Rupert Hoogewerf to AFP.Read More →
In her upcoming book Lotus author Zhang Lijia explores the life of Chinese sex workers, taking the life of her grandmother, a concubine, as a starting point. On the weblog Zhen de Gender, she explains what it took to do her research. “Prostitution is just a device, a window to show the tensions and the changes.”Read More →
Next year author Zhang Lijia will publish her novel Lotus, on sex workers in southern China, inspired by her grandmother. Caijing interviews her about this inspiration and about how sex changed in China.Read More →
Rich Chinese think their cars represent the way they stand in society. But Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of the Hurun Rich List, found out there might be a huge difference between the car owners and the rest of the Chinese, he tells the Shanghai Daily.Read More →
Rock artist and Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo recalls in the Wall Street Journal how Beijing became for a short while the Mecca of heavy metal, as artists from around the world gathered for this niche market in music. Read More →
Many foreign companies fail when they try to enter the China market. According to William Bao Bean, a partner at Shanghai venture capital firm SOSV, dealing with over 120 startups per year, that is because they follow too often the instincts they take along from their home market. Wrong, he tells in the South China Morning Post.Read More →
Author Zhang Lijia will visit London for most of the month February She is currently finishing her novel about prostitution in China, and a frequent commentators on social affairs in China. Your can read some of her stories here.Read More →
Beijing underwent for the first time a code red for pollution: officially the worst air quality ever. But the air had been worse before, even a week earlier. Beijing-based journalist Ian Johnson sees a silver lining on the code red: the people and the politicians start to see things have to change, he writes in the New York Review of Books. And that is good new for the Paris talks.Read More →
President Xi Jinping´s “China Dream” comes along with a slick propaganda campaign. But the center piece of the campaign, a clay figurine of a chubby peasant girl in a red smock, has split the artisan Tianjin family who made the image, discovered journalist Ian Johnson for the New York Times.Read More →