When a nation provides international aid for medical supplies and doctors it can gain allies around the world. Refusing aid builds resentment. In Ethiopia, politician Shumete Gizaw hands over a box of medical supplies to Minister of Health Lia Tadesse, part of a...
A Chinese AI program negates the Tianenmen Square uprising. Google Calendar has struck out Black History Month. Why remember the scars of the past? Thousands of people at Victoria Park in Hong Kong 4 June 2019 attend a candlelight vigil for victims of the Chinese...
Social media memes are at the forefront of the latest form of passive resistance against China’s grinding work culture. “Lying flat” meme. I’m supposed to write a piece for News Decoder, but if I were a hip young Chinese, maybe I’d just “lie flat”...
So much reporting about China by Western journalists focuses on the Communist Party, human rights and economic growth, that it is refreshing to read an account by an “old China hand” that explores a quiet rebellion by Chinese youth expressed in purposefully ambiguous social media memes. Lying flat, touching a fish, being Buddha-like and saying “Whatever” sound innocuous enough, but they belie deep disenchantment among many young Chinese over “the relentlessness that has driven the economy to growth rates far faster than any developed country in the West,” as David Schlesinger puts it. Schlesinger’s account is all the more relevant as many young people outside China, fed up with COVID-19, are deserting the workaday world for a time out.
Exercise: Ask students to list their main grievances and what they can do about them.
A top secret White House document, surprisingly declassified, says the U.S. should seek “primacy” against rival China and promote ties with India. Chinese leader Xi Jinping invites then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (L) to review an honour guard during a...
China wasted no time shipping aid to Italy as the European nation struggled to contain COVID-19 — “soft power” to counter criticism of Beijing. A China Eastern flight from Shanghai with aid for the coronavirus arrives in Rome, Italy, 12 March 2020....