Rock artist and Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo recalls in the Wall Street Journal how Beijing became for a short while the Mecca of heavy metal, as artists from around the world gathered for this niche market in music. Read More →
Many foreign companies fail when they try to enter the China market. According to William Bao Bean, a partner at Shanghai venture capital firm SOSV, dealing with over 120 startups per year, that is because they follow too often the instincts they take along from their home market. Wrong, he tells in the South China Morning Post.Read More →
Author Zhang Lijia will visit London for most of the month February She is currently finishing her novel about prostitution in China, and a frequent commentators on social affairs in China. Your can read some of her stories here.Read More →
Beijing underwent for the first time a code red for pollution: officially the worst air quality ever. But the air had been worse before, even a week earlier. Beijing-based journalist Ian Johnson sees a silver lining on the code red: the people and the politicians start to see things have to change, he writes in the New York Review of Books. And that is good new for the Paris talks.Read More →
President Xi Jinping´s “China Dream” comes along with a slick propaganda campaign. But the center piece of the campaign, a clay figurine of a chubby peasant girl in a red smock, has split the artisan Tianjin family who made the image, discovered journalist Ian Johnson for the New York Times.Read More →
Traditionally, between the active women in China, there was not much coherence. But since this Spring, partly caused by the government crackdown on feminists, things are changing, Beijing-based author Zhang Lijia tells the BBC.Read More →
Jindong Cai is a professor at Stanford University and an orchestra conductor with a long reputation in China. Journalist Ian Johnson discusses the special position Beethoven has in China, for the New York Times.Read More →
An aging population is no exception, but China is becoming grey fast, before it earned enough money to deal with the consequences, writes author and journalist Zhang Lijia in Al Jazeera. The dramatic fallout of the one-child policy.Read More →
Chinese are looking for new meanings in their life, says journalist Ian Johnson. They are looking for religious values, both condoned by the government or illegal, but also shop around for other spiritual values. And mostly the government supports that search, as long as there are no foreign links.Read More →
Feminists and their lawyers and NGO´s have a hard time as they face continued repression under Xi Jinping´s tenure. Author Zhang Lijia explains in Al Jazeera why China needs feminists and the current crackdown is not night.Read More →
The debate on the clash between traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine continues after Tu Youyou obtained as the first Chinese the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Journalist Ian Johnson interviews for the New York Times the eminent expert Paul U.Unschuld on the position of Chinese Traditional Medicine in today´s China.Read More →
Beijing has many ways to dive into its colorful past. Author Zhang Lijia joined last Sunday the Boxer rebellion walking tour, an episode in China’s history where interpretation way much, depending whether you are a Western of a Chinese scholar.Read More →