Flashlights in the Dark

I have to admit, I haven’t read a single story about foreign journalists with China visa problems. I found them all to smack of the same droll, insular, looping urgency of first world problems. If all of the reporters were white, I would just say “privilege” and dip my face back into the Stream and […]

The Empire Strikes Back

China-based hacks into commercial and political networks across the planet have made the news again, with the Trend Micro report on an attack called LuckyCat that targeted Asian defense systems as well as Tibetan networks. The attack was traced back to a graduate of Chengdu’s Sichuan University, Gu Kaiyuan. Gu currently works for Tencent and […]

A True Belief

Tom from Seeing Red in China pointed out some China Quarterly essays and one of them is the inspiration for this essay … Few of China’s problems seem so intractable as the issue of the Chinese soul and what morals are available to guide it in the 21st century. The whole concept of a soul […]

Ai Wei Wei, prepare for martyrdom

It’s hard to watch a good man go down, but that is exactly what I find myself doing everyday now since Ai Wei Wei’s battle with the Chinese government took over the front pages of a lot of the mainstream media and China related blogs. He is a heroic figure and, for Westerners, his return […]

/facepalm

Man everywhere i look the oppression is just getting deeper and deeper — at least when I peep the news. there is China doing all it can to keep dissidents either silent or dead or scared out of their wits there is Iran, hailing revolutions one day, torturing them the next there is Libya and […]

Rape is the Consort of War

That just kind of came to me earlier today while reading this story here about Somalis in Minneapolis becoming “radicalized” and then heading back to Somalia to be warriors. I was envisioning the journalist interviewing one of the young boys who went back to fight and having the young boy go into a tirade about […]

Violence in Xinjiang

Uighers in Urumqi rioted over the past 24 hours, destroying property, killing people and fighting the police. The immediate cause for the riots was a brawl in Shaoguan, Canton Province that began after some fool posted a note on QQ saying that 6 Uigher boys had raped 2 Han women. Han workers then rampaged through […]

China’s Charter 08

“China, as a major nation of the world, as one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the UN Council on Human Rights, should be contributing to peace for humankind and progress toward human rights. Unfortunately, we stand today as the only country among the major nations […]

The Security Establishment

Now that I have finished my stint in a semi-corporate setting in a security company, i can let you know a little bit about how things work. These companies do business here with the permssion of the Chinese government. This means that they are under the constant supervision of the Public Security Bureau. As such, […]