Month: April 2013

Artists and officials, cosy together in the Middle Kingdom

Posted on by Jason Li

Over at the Atlantic, Nick Frisch discusses the outrage that ensued when Mo Yan, “Communist Party member, People’s Liberation Army veteran, Vice-Chairman of the state-run China Writers’ Association” won the Nobel Prize for Literature last October.

 The paper quoted Gao Xingjian, the 2000 literature laureate whose dissident stature and French citizenship made him ineligible for recognition as a “Chinese”…

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Ethnography of Tech

Some initial thoughts about the popularity of QQ’s WeChat (aka Weixin)

Posted on by Tricia Wang
Shake it function (摇一摇)
Shake it function (摇一摇)

Excerpted from Bytes of China:

A few weeks ago, a conversation about the popularity of WeChat emerged on a tech mailing lists. Someone posted several reasons why they thought WeChat was more usable than Skype. They listed several technical reasons, such as ease of use, great mobile interface, and more efficient…

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How a bookstore evolved into becoming a banned books center in Hong Kong

Posted on by Jason Li

PeoplesRecreation1

From the Atlantic, In Hong Kong, a Sanctuary for Banned Books:

Later that year we began to get mainland visitors from cities like Beijing and Tianjin who were traveling on their own. Our sign said “People’s Commune” in Chinese, and our logo was Mao Zedong’s face, so maybe that caught their eye. Sometimes, customers would ask…

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