· October, 2009

Stories about Chinese from October, 2009

China's Dark Satanic Mills

  28 October 2009

On Oct. 14th, Chinese photographer Lu Guang won this year's $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his photos on China’s environment. The Fund’s website posts the following paragraph describing Lu Guang’s project: Lu Guang has been documenting the ecological disasters in China resulting from the rapid growth...

Germany and China: Berlin Twitter Wall

  27 October 2009

berlintwitterwall is a project organized by the city of Berlin to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin wall. The wall is now filled up with messages from Chinese twitterers against the Chinese Great Fire Wall which blocks Chinese Internet user from connecting with the outside world.

Hong Kong: Property market bubbles burst into public outrage

  27 October 2009

Earlier in October, an apartment in Hong Kong was sold for USD$57 million, a recording breaking price, locally and globally. The 6,158 square foot duplex apartment is in a building called “Conduit Road 39″ located at the western mid-levels of Hong Kong Island. The unidentified buyer is from Mainland China....

China: Relics of the Old Summer Palace

  25 October 2009

Back in the news again is Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, whose destruction still remains a sensitive topic in China. Built during the Qing Dynasty, it was later sacked by British and French troops in 1860 during the Second Opium War. Countless works of art were also looted from the palace...

China: Nobel Dream

  22 October 2009

This month, the Chinese press and online forums are saturated with coverage of Charles Kao’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Yet another overseas Chinese scientist has snatched the prestigious prize, this temporary moment of shared glory is quickly turned into a more profound question: when would China produce its first indigenous Nobel Prize winner?

China: From heroic to ignorant masses, and then…

  20 October 2009

The Chinese communist ideology has been eroding rapidly in the past two decades due to economic development. Traces of its revolutionary belief can still be found in political propaganda pieces published in the state owned media. Words like “the masses” marks the past ideological imprint. However, in recent years, the...

China: Graduate thesis or practical training?

  15 October 2009

The purpose and function of university education has been a highly debatable topic both in the East and the West. In China, people strongly believe that education is a route to success and in the past few years, the number of university students has increased rapidly. However, as the problem...

China: Plenty of trash to burn

  7 October 2009

As landfills run out of space and NIMBY protests occur across China, the number of trash incineration plants has increased in step. With one such plant planned for a densely-populated residential area in Guangzhou, locals have plenty of heated words for authorities.

China: Stopping people's grievances from visiting Beijing

  7 October 2009

The letter and visit petition system (xinfang) is an administrative system for hearing complaints and grievances from individuals in China. The state and local bureaus of letters and visits are in charge of receiving letters, calls and visits from individuals or groups. The officers then channel the issues to respective...

About our Chinese coverage

Oiwan Lam
Oi wan Lam is the North East Asia editor. Email her story ideas or volunteer to write.