Ma Licheng on the Say No Club
A long essay by Ma Licheng, a former senior editor of the People’s Daily‘s commentary page, has been circulating on the Chinese Internet. I received it via the mailing list Minjian International. The...
View ArticleNews of the Nobel night
Thanks to the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony this evening, in which Liu Xiaobo is being honoured, the campaign of the Chinese government to condemn the prize as an anti-China, and indeed an...
View ArticleLittle uproar about death of fishermen rammed by Korean boat
The BBC and Financial Times reported on 20 December that a Korean patrol boat rammed a Chinese fishing boat in Korean territorial waters, causing the death of two fishermen. The FT said the incident...
View ArticleChinese reactions to earthquake in Japan
Predictably, there is quite a bit of schadenfreude on the Chinese Internet about the earthquake in Japan. One e-mail from a student in Shanghai, circulated on the Minjian International mailing list,...
View ArticleWho speaks for the West in Chinese media?
A recent issue of the Chinese edition of Global Times — a nationalistic offshoot of the People’s Daily — quoted the “famous geopolitics expert and petroleum scientist” F. William Engdahl as saying that...
View ArticleBurma: China’s latest bully
On MqVU, I write about the mixed reactions to the suspension of the Chinese-invested Myitsone Dam megaproject by the Burmese government. While some liberal commentators see in it a failure of China’s...
View ArticleThe newspaper burning
Various sites have been reporting — although the Tianya thread was quickly deleted — on the open burning of newspapers belonging to the Southern Media Group on 17 November in Taiyuan and 18 November in...
View ArticleNew CCTV director on what is false news
Hu Zhanfan 胡占凡, the former editor-in-chief of Guangming Daily, the rather quaint ideological paper of the Communist Party, has been promoted to director of China Central Television. In May, Hu gave a...
View ArticleHungary can say no
Yesterday, the largest demonstration since 1989 took place in Hungary. At least one hundred thousand people joined what the organisers called a “March of Peace” to support the nationalist government,...
View ArticleWill Chinese nationalists support Scottish independence?
Four years ago, online Chinese nationalists promised they would come to the London Olympics with slogans supporting Scottish independence in retaliation for the “Free Tibet” demonstrators who protested...
View Article