Award-winning journalist Ian Johnson reports in ChinaFile on the monthly trip poet Liu Xia makes to visit her husband, Nobel price winner Lui Xiaobo, and her slowly increasing production of new poems. “A small, fragile woman with extremely short-cropped hair that sets off her high cheekbones and bright, wide eyes.”Read More →
2017 is going to be a productive year for both Zhang Lijia and Ian Johnson as they are going to publish their long-awaited books. Both are very well versed in documenting cultural change in China, a development that often remain undetected for the outside world.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson explores for the New York Times, the search by Yang Weidong into what he calls the soul of China. He interviewed and filmed 405 thinkers, artists, musicians, writers, historians — anyone who has thought hard about China’s future. “Some are government critics, others support the party, but all have opinions.”Read More →
Feminism is on the rise in China, and much has changed for the better, tells author and journalist Zhang Lijia of the upcoming novel Lotus: A Novel, in TakePart.Com, in an issue on feminism in China. But too many things have not yet changed, or change too slowly.Read More →
Author Alec Ash published after four years of study Wish Lanterns: Inside the Young Lives of China, documenting the life of the millenniums in China. Journalist Ian Johnson of the New York Times sat down with him to discuss how they are bringing change to China.Read More →
Zhang Lijia´s upcoming novel Lotus: A Novel will only appear early 2017, but the first raving reviews are already coming in. Renowned Indian author Amitav Ghosh praises the story the main figure migrant Lotus and the way she ends up in prostitution.Read More →
McDonald´s might be in China for decades, it still has problems to adjust to the fast changing realities on the ground, says business analyst Shaun Rein to QZ. They now decided to increase their franchises and leave the cooking to people who better know the Chinese taste, says Shaun Rein, and that seems a smart idea.Read More →
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 →