Jul 16
The front page of This Morning 6 o’ Clock today features a picture of Zhou Qifeng (周其凤), the president of Peking University, kneeling down before his mother and hugging her on her 90th birthday. The headline reads, “Peking University president kneels to thank his mother.” A smaller heading below it says this act of filial piety has sparked controversy. Read more
Jul 15
Chaoyang district occupies a big chunk of the properous east side of Beijing city containing the new CCTV building and the “Central Business District” or CBD, the heart of which is a multi-lane spaghetti junction connecting Jianguomenwai Boulevard and the Third Ring Road. In June 10, 2010, the Chaoyang district government published the following announcement on their website:
Recently, a cartoon girl with black hair and big eyes comes into the life of Chaoyang residents. The little girl, named Luo Baobei, is the Cartoon Image Ambassador for Chaoyang District to bid for National Civilized Urban Area. Read more
Jul 2
Today the front page of Jilin’s City Evening News features a headshot of teacher Zhang Lili (张丽莉) in front of a Chinese flag. The headline: “Zhang Lili, the ‘most beautiful teacher,’ joins the Party.” Read more
Jun 29
This is the 1510 Digest, a weekly roundup of recent essays and articles published in Chinese on My1510.cn, with links to translations on the Marco Polo Project.
Today’s first posting is the tale of an angry citizen calling Shaanxi provincial government offices to complain about the recent forced abortion scandal. Read more
Jun 18
The front page of the Guizhou Metropolis Daily today features a large photo of Lei Feng, with the headline: “Who has seen him?”
The article says the whole city of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, has mobilized in search of the true ‘Lei Fengs’ among them. Lei Feng was a Mao era soldier who was held up as a selfless and modest person and posthumously became the subject of a massive propaganda campaign: ‘Learn from Comrade Lei Feng’ (向雷锋同志学习). Lei Feng often features in various propaganda campaigns. Read more
Jun 15
This week’s 1510 Digest, a weekly English summary of essays and reportage published on the Chinese website My1510.cn: Read more
Jun 4
The Jinan Times is a daily newspaper based in Shandong province. Today’s front page features a picture of a distressed student along with a phony university admissions letter. The headline reads: “68 ‘university students’ realize on the eve of their graduation that they have been duped.” The story is about a recently uncovered higher education scam, where a man called Zhao Lianshan distributed fake university admission offers to students who had not scored high enough on the entrance exam to get in. Read more
Apr 9
The front page top headline of the Beijing Morning Post, April 3: “In Beijing, 73,400 people registered for the gaokao (the national college entrance exam).” This represents a decline in registrants, down from 76,000 last year. The article predicted, however, that university admissions would remain stable: that is around 80% of gaokao candidates would get a place at a university.
According to regulations of the Beijing Education Commission, only those who have an official Beijing hukou (residence permit) may sit the exam in Beijing. People from outside Beijing who recently received official Beijing-residency status must have received their status before December 5, 2011 to qualify. Read more
Sep 7
There’s a growing perception that American universities are admitting Chinese students based on fraudulent applications. How big is this problem, and who is responsible for it? Tim Hathaway investigated the problem for the Southern Weekly, and this is what he found:
Sep 5
Here is another episode of Kuang Kuang’s Diary, featuring Kuang Kuang, the primary school boy with a permanent bloody nose, and his girlfriend Xiao Hong.
This episode is called The 38th Parallel, a reference to the border between North and South Korea. In Chinese primary schools in the 1970s and 1980s, boys and girls who shared a desk would often draw a line down the middle of the desk and call it the 38th Parallel, meaning it was not to be crossed.
The 38th Parallel is presented here for the first time with English subtitles. Read more
An essay by Danwei staff writer Eric Mu.
When I was a kid, university graduates were as rare as unicorns, now they are more like popcorn: cheap and plentiful. No big surprise, considering there are millions of fresh ones every year to join a large pool of millions of existing graduates. All are desperate for white-collar jobs that are not easy to come by in China’s manufacturing economy. The problem of university graduates finding jobs has been debated in the media for at least a decade as a difficult social issue and it never improves.
Sep 2
Ralph Jennings is a journalist who has contributed advice columns to the Beijing-based 21st Century newspaper since 2000.
I was working at the China Daily eleven years ago. One day, during an editing shift, a colleague suddenly popped up beside my desk and said the paper’s English-language weekly 21st Century needed an advice columnist and could I do the job.
Sure, I said, but I don’t know what to tell the 10 to 15 people who write in every week with complaints about dark family pasts, bad breakups, test score distress, scholarship corruption and college roommates who steal things.
I have written the “Just Ask” column ever since then, as much as to give the people behind the letters a few trashy lines of advice that they could have thought of themselves as to learn from the students about how things work in China.
The column, which I now write from my kitchen table in Taipei, has become my telescope into the fractious, conflicted lives of the weekly paper’s main readers: Chinese students from grades six through grad school.
Aug 29
Early this year, an animation showing a group of bunnies oppressed by tigers and then rising up in rebellion became an overnight hit in China, soon making it to international TV news, including Australia’s ABC.
The video was part of an long series of animations featuring Kuang Kuang, the little boy with the bloody nose. Kuang Kuang’s adventures are pure fantasy, but to many Chinese people born in the 1970s and 1980s, Kuang Kuang’s school experiences are all too familiar. The animations are also the closest thing China has to South Park. Read more
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