Author Zhang Lijia of “Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China taught herself English while working at a rocket factory in Nanjing. For World English she recalls how she managed that job and discovered the advantages of being a non-native English speaker.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson interviews for the New York Review of Book one of the famous Chinese documentary filmmakers, Hu Jie, whose films have never been shown in China itself, covering subjects like Mao, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine. A life of dealing with tough issues.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson describes his friend and colleague Peter Hessler for The New York Review of Books, and analyses his often controversial take on China. For example his take on dissidents in China. ” Hessler’s four books have sold 385,000 copies in the US, a figure that easily makes him the most influential popular writer on China in decades.”Read More →
Author Howard French of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa is leading a campaign against the famous US news program ´60 Minutes´ and how they cover Africa. From the Humanosphere. One major problem: they mainly ignore local people.Read More →
Finally the government takes pollution serious, long after its citizens noted the dangers, concludes journalist Ian Johnson in ChinaFile, after a smog documentary was taken off the internet. But censors acted after 100 million Chinese watched the much-praised movie, that sparked off an unprecedented debate.Read More →
Tibetian Buddhism has become popular in the West, but also among rich Han Chinese. Journalist Ian Johnson discusses with author John Osburn the reasons behind this popularity in a two-piece interview for the New York Times.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson interviewed Chinese intellectuals and asked them about Ilham Tohti, the economist and Uighur activist who was arrested in January. For the New York Review of Books looks for a reason why the moderate intellectual was arrested. China does not like moderate Uighurs, is one of his conclusions.Read More →
In a detailed write-up for the Columbia Journalism Review former foreign correspondent Howard French describes how Bloomberg started to engage in political reporting in China, to compete with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but killed a successful journalism project, after China´s power-brokers turned up the heat.Read More →
Why are you mostly writing in English, is a question author Zhang Lijia, a native from Nanjing, often has to answer. In English: “I can be bold and adventurous”, she writes for the English Editing Blog.Read More →
The author Zhang Lijia was one of the first journalists who introduced the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng to Western media, now 12 years ago. After his daring escape, they found now time to meet at NYU in New York, Zhang Lijia tells on her weblog.Read More →
In an amazing act of unprofessional behavior CNN took last week the British actor Christian Bale to visit Chen Guangcheng, a blind legal activist, hitting a world-wide audience, but leaving many wonder what the broadcasters was doing. “A complete failure of journalistic integrity,” writes Shaun Rein in Forbes.Read More →
Author Zhang Lijia participated in a debate by the British Chamber of Commerce in Beijing on how British media portrait China and argued that they do not paint a fair picture but look of a negative angle or the quirky approach, not in giving a fair picture.Read More →