Author Zhang Lijia was one of the first who helped to write stories about the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng for Western media. Like the story in 2002 for Newsweek, reposted on her weblog. “We have to fight for our rights ourselves.” Read More →

The village of Wukan was one of the latest high-profile uprisings of an increasingly better educated and world-savvy class of migrants. In The Diplomat celebrity author Zhang Lijia analyses why China’s ‘peasants’ will get their rights too.Read More →

Author Zhang Lijia visited Taiwan for the first time and was pleasantly surprised. One conclusion: democracy is not against the character of the Chinese, as leaders on the mainland sometimes suggest, she explains on her weblog.Read More →

Three blasts, two deaths and six wound is the toll of a bomb attack by the disgruntled farmer in Fuzhou, who had been petitioning the government in vain. Political analyst Victor Shih notes in his weblog how the bomber – against all odds – turned into a martyr at the internet. Read More →

Shaun Rein by Fantake via Flickr America should not give in on its core values like its democracy, writes Shaun Rein in Forbes, but it can most certainly learn a few lessons from the way China dealt with the financial crisis. First, although China’s leaders are not elected democratically, theyRead More →

Victor Shih via Flickr China’s commercial banks are stocking up to US$ 60 bn to fuel a next round of investments, tells financial expert professor Victor Shih in BusinessWeek. Earlier professor Shih of the NorthWestern University raised concern on how the country might funds its earlier spending extravaganza, but the recentRead More →

Howard French is associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and former New York Times correspondent in Africa, Japan, and China. As correspondent for the New York Times, he was not only an alert observer of the society he was in, but was able to compare and connect between those worlds, much to the benefit of his audience. He travels from New York.Read More →