Category: China
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Tiananmen at 25: Massive Reading Round-Up, June 3 Edition
Edward Wong of the New York Times tweeted the above yesterday, but I’m afraid the Chinese authorities are trying to close the barn door after the horse has escaped. As you can see below, foreign media are publishing Tiananmen stories left and right, and I’m afraid I did a very bad job trying to keep…
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Bookshelf: Lean In and Leftover Women
Possibly the most commented-on thing I’ve ever written online came about when I said that I didn’t really want to read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, a bestseller in which the Facebook COO encourages young women to take charge of their careers and aim for the top. Even though…
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Tiananmen at 25: Super-Sized Reading Round-Up
Now that June 4 is less than a week away, news organizations around the world are ramping up their coverage of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests and crackdown. Though I’ve been limiting these posts to five points each in previous weeks, there’s so much to recommend this week that I had to make…
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A New Act in Shanghai Security Theater
As I said a couple of days ago, there’s a much more visible police presence on the streets of Shanghai these days, particularly on major avenues like Nanjing and Huaihai Roads. The increased patrols started in the days leading up to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s visit last week, and it seems that they’ll now…
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Tiananmen at 25: The Weekly Reading Round-Up
As the June Fourth anniversary grows closer, security measures in China continue to tighten. The anniversary’s approach has also coincided with a spate of terrorist acts in China’s western region of Xinjiang, where explosive devices detonated in a market on Thursday morning killed 31 people and injured nearly 100 more. In Shanghai, a visit by…
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Overcoming a Fear of Chinese Banks
I’ve long had a deep-seated case of yinhangophobia, or the fear of Chinese banks (银行 yinhang=bank), and as a result done everything I could to avoid them. Part of my wariness came from direct experience: when I first arrived in China in 2005, I carried most of my money in traveler’s cheques, which had been…
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Tiananmen at 25: This Week’s Links
• There have been more detentions as the Beijing government works to ensure that no one is left voicing dissent on the day of the June Fourth anniversary. Anthony Kuhn of NPR News gives an overview of the recent crackdown in this Morning Edition report. Heather Timmons at Quartz has put together a list of…
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Wall Street Journal: Tiananmen Amnesia and Tiananmen Exiles
Now up at the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report blog, my new column on Rowena Xiaoqing He’s recent book, Tiananmen Exiles: In “Tiananmen Exiles,” Ms. He interviews Shen Tong and Wang Dan, both important figures in the Beijing protest movement, as well as Yi Danxuan, who was a student leader in Guangzhou. All…
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Leftover Women: In Pictures
I began reading Leta Hong Fincher’s eagerly anticipated Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China last night, and one chapter in, I now know that the Marriage and Family Research Association here classifies me as a Category 3 Leftover Woman (ages 31-35, dubbed the “Buddha of victorious battles” for achieving professional advancement—though a…
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Tiananmen at 25: Voices Silenced
Heading into this spring, other China-watchers and I occasionally discussed the widespread crackdown on dissenting voices that President Xi Jinping implemented over his first year in office, and we all agreed that things would probably tighten even further as the 25th anniversary of the June Fourth massacre approached. Unfortunately, that prediction has proven true—even more…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 