"My intentions here are simple: avoid discussions about what exactly constitutes Chinese photography, evade overwhelming information, and instead visually examine the role that such photographs play in shaping
China’s image"
(English, French, Chinese). Some whimsical — Alain Delorme
Totems, others moving — Song Chao
Miners,
Migrant workers and
Hold.
posted by unliteral
on May 19, 2013 -
5 comments
Chako Paul City is a women-only city in the north of Sweden, established in 1820 by a wealthy widow. It is "a place that is respectful of women's love, but with a rule that men cannot enter"; the few who have tried have found themselves beaten half to death by the formidable Amazonian sentries at its gates. It has a castle, and its main industry is forestry, with a sideline in lesbian tourism. Of the 25,000 women, from all over Europe, living in Chako Paul City, those wishing to seek male company are allowed to leave, but may only reenter after having bathed and undertaken several other measures to avoid negatively affecting the mental state of the other residents.
[more inside]
posted by acb
on Apr 24, 2013 -
76 comments
"Chinese citizens can file petitions about their grievance with so-called letters and visits offices of various levels of government organs and courts, a mechanism set up in the 1950s. Under the current system, the number of petitions filed during an official's tenure is used as a yardstick for performance evaluation, prompting local governments to use every means possible to stop petitioners and shuffle them home. It has become an open secret that local governments hire "black guards" in the capital to stop petitioners from filing a grievance, thus reducing the number of petitions that are recorded." --
A day in the life of a Beijing "black guard".
posted by MartinWisse
on Apr 3, 2013 -
17 comments
The Forces Of The Next 30 Years - SF author and
Mefi's Own Charles Stross talks to students at Olin College about sci-fi, fiction, speculation, the limits of computation, thermodynamics, Moore's Law, the history of travel, employment, automation, free trade, demographics, the developing world, privacy, and climate change in trying to answer the question
What Does The World Of 2043 Look Like? (Youtube 56:43)
posted by The Whelk
on Mar 27, 2013 -
18 comments
The Netherlands has of course long been a hub in the international illegal drugs trade, but the white powder currently being exported to China on such a scale that it leads to local shortages is not quite the powder you're thinking of:
infant milk formula.
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Mar 14, 2013 -
61 comments
Generation Gap: "The parents of China’s post-1980 generation [the bā líng hòu (八零後)] (themselves born between 1950 and 1965) grew up in a rural, Maoist world utterly different from that of their children. In their adolescence, there was one phone per village, the universities were closed and jobs were assigned from above. If you imagine the disorientation and confusion of many parents in the West when it comes to the internet and its role in their children’s lives, and then add to that dating, university life and career choices, you come close to the generational dilemma. Parents who spent their own early twenties labouring on remote farms have to deal with children who measure their world in malls, iPhones and casual dates."
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Mar 7, 2013 -
16 comments
Death in Singapore The body of a young US electronics engineer, Shane Todd, was found hanging in his Singapore apartment. Police said it was suicide, but the Todd family believe he was murdered. Shane had feared that a project he was working on was compromising US national security. His parents want to know if that project sent him to his grave.
posted by donovan
on Feb 19, 2013 -
17 comments
[Roy Chapman] Andrews is best remembered for the series of
dramatic expeditions he led to the
Gobi of Mongolia (shorter films:
1,
2) from 1922 to 1930. Andrews took a team of scientists into previously unexplored parts of the desert using some of the region’s first automobiles with extra supplies transported by camel caravan.
Andrews – for whom
adventure and narrow escapes from death were a staple of exploring – is said to have served as inspiration for the Hollywood character “
Indiana Jones.”
Andrews’s expeditions to the Gobi remain significant for, among other discoveries, their finds of the first nests of dinosaur eggs, new species of dinosaurs, and the fossils of early mammals that co-existed with dinosaurs.
[more inside]
posted by ersatz
on Feb 17, 2013 -
8 comments
Shengguan Tu (升官圖) "Promoting the Officials" is a Chinese board game " where players assume the of an aspiring mandarin, moving through the imperial examinations and through the bureaucracy, eventually rising to the “Da Nei” or inner sanctum Grand Secretariat in the imperial household. Along the way, players pay “donations” to higher ranked players in each department." It has existed in some form since the Tang dynasty (618 - 906 CE) at least and now
it's a Flash game. Programmed by Dave Lyons who also wrote a quick introduction to the game, from which the above is taken.
posted by MartinWisse
on Feb 14, 2013 -
7 comments
Over a thousand monks and laymen are revered in Tibetan Buddhism as the incarnations of past teachers who convey enlightenment to their followers from one lifetime to the next. Some of the most respected are known by the honorific "rinpoche." For eight centuries, rinpoches were traditionally identified by other monks and then locked inside monasteries ringed by mountains, far from worldly distractions. Their reincarnation lineages were easily tracked across successive lives. Then the Chinese Red Army invaded Tibet in 1950 and drove the religion's adherents into exile. Now, the younger rinpoches of the Tibetan diaspora are being exposed to all of the twenty-first century’s dazzling temptations. So, even as Tibetan Buddhism is gaining more followers around the world, an increasing number of rinpoches are abandoning their monastic vows.
Reincarnation in Exile. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 5, 2013 -
16 comments
"Almost a decade since the end of the hit American TV series
Friends, the show — and, in particular,
the fictitious Central Perk cafe, where much of the action took place — is enjoying an afterlife in China's capital, Beijing. Here, the show that chronicled the exploits of New York City pals Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey is almost seen as a lifestyle guide."
posted by vidur
on Jan 23, 2013 -
37 comments
The practice of lying to one's children to encourage behavioral compliance was investigated among parents in the US (N = 114) and China (N = 85). The vast majority of parents (84% in the US and 98% in China) reported having lied to their children for this purpose. Within each country, the practice most frequently took the form of falsely threatening to leave a child alone in public if he or she refused to follow the parent. Crosscultural differences were seen: A larger proportion of the parents in China reported that they employed instrumental lie-telling to promote behavioral compliance, and a larger proportion approved of this practice, as compared to the parents in the US. This difference was not seen on measures relating to the practice of lying to promote positive feelings, or on measures relating to statements about fantasy characters such as the tooth fairy.
Findings are discussed with reference to sociocultural values and certain parenting-related challenges that extend across cultures. [HTML] --
[PDF] [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Jan 23, 2013 -
82 comments
"To the world of today the men of medieval Christendom already seem remote and unfamiliar. Their names and deeds are recorded in our history-books, their monuments still adorn our cities, but our kinship with them is a thing unreal, which costs an effort of imagination. How much more must this apply to the great Islamic civilization, that stood over against medieval Europe, menacing its existence and yet linked to it by a hundred ties that even war and fear could not sever. Its monuments too abide, for those who may have the fortunate to visit them, but its men and manners are to most of us utterly unknown, or dimly conceived in the romantic image of the Arabian Nights. Even for the specialist it is difficult to reconstruct their lives and see them as they were. Histories and biographies there are in quantity, but the historians for all their picturesque details, seldom show the ability to select the essential and to give their figures that touch of the intimate which makes them live again for the reader. It is in this faculty that Ibn Battuta excels."
Thus begins the book, "Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354" published by Routledge and Kegan Paul. Step
into the world of "
the first tourist" who made his mark as
the world's greatest traveler before the age of steam.
[more inside]
posted by infini
on Jan 12, 2013 -
21 comments
Historically, the
city states of the Malay Peninsula often paid tribute to regional kingdoms such as those
of China and
Siam. Closer relations with China were
established in the early 15th century during the
reign of Parameswara, founder of Melaka,
when Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho)
sailed through the Straits of Malacca. Impressed
by the tribute, the
Yongle Emperor of China
is said to have presented Princess Hang Li Po
* as a gift to Mansur Shah,
then Sultan of
Malacca (+/-1459 AD). Tradition
claims the courtiers and servants
who accompanied the princess
settled in Bukit Cina, intermarried
with the locals
and grew into a community known
as the Peranakan.
Colloquially known as Baba-Nyonya, the Peranakan or Straits Chinese, they retained
many of their
ethnic and religious customs, but
assimilated the
language and clothing of
the Malays. They
developed a unique
culture and
distinct foods.
Nyonya cuisine is
one of the most highly rated in the South East Asian
region, considered some of the
most difficult to master but
very easy to
love and
enjoy.
posted by infini
on Dec 24, 2012 -
25 comments
On March 20th 1913, Song Jiaoren, China’s first democratically elected prime minister, was
assassinated as he waited for a train in Shanghai. With him died China's best shot at democratic government.
posted by Chrysostom
on Dec 21, 2012 -
6 comments
"
Honey laundering is a complex exercise that involves several players in the honey chain from apiary to wholesaler to retailer. In the case against ALW, evidence was presented to show the use of fake country-of-origin documents for shipments, replacement of labels on Chinese containers with fraudulent ones, switching of honey containers in a third country, and even the blending of Chinese honey with glucose syrup or honey from another country."
posted by vidur
on Dec 6, 2012 -
37 comments
