Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

Reunion

Reunion Passion announces (Fr) that an exhibit is taking place in Paris September 12 and 13 to relaunch Reunion as a tourism destination entitled: “Reunion is Waiting for You.” Reunion's tourism industry was dealt a blow by an ongoing Chikungunya fever outburst.

China

Sunfai comments on the T.V news feature on water pollution in Dongjiang (Guangdong province), the river is the source of Hong Kong fresh water. The blogger says that there is a repeated formular in environmental news in Hong Kong: blaming China for everything. However, as a city with 7 millions people, its natural resources are all from China, why so unreflective? (zh)

China

Ai Wei Wei talks about Beijing renovation in preparation for the Olympic, his beautiful traditional courtyard will turn into an artificial theatre, and so will the whole old Beijing city and its people: within one night, all the old courtyard in the district were painted by a gigantic hand with cement, history, memories and traces were all wiped away.(zh).

South Korea

Francis from interlocals.net writes an analyical piece on the implication of U.S-Korea handover of wartime operation command: The real issue here is not really about sovereign right of military command, but the subtly and deeply changing role and strategy of the ROK-US military alliance with very strong regional implications. Not only the US bases and facilities so widely spread in South Korea will become perfect launch-pads, but the South Korean military will also be involved in ‘flexible’ operations.

China

WangXianfeng puts up several proposals on how to buy an apartment in Beijing, it turns out none of those are realistic (zh).

China

Picking up the discussion from Peking Duck on the purging Mao from history book, Frog in a Well explains that the history book revision project is to change the historical perspective from a leader-oriented perspective to people-oriented perspective. And the revised edition is just in Shanghai.

China

Richard in Peking Duck raises a question concerning the suspected Sex and Shanghai hoax: Are the BBS forums in China really erupting in flames over the dastardly foreigner, or is this a false image that somehow got reported as gospel, and then got blown up out of all proportion by the naive and ignorant lapdog bloggers (like myself)?

The question leads to an extremely long list of comments on role of foreign blogger, in particular ESWN who is now in Beijing.