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
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
" Thus in today’s China one confronts the paradox of a communist regime that is at ideological loggerheads with left-leaning intellectuals, but which finds pro-Western, liberal intellectuals on the whole quite congenial." Richard Wolin is
Dreaming In Chinese...
posted by artof.mulata
on Mar 26, 2012 -
12 comments
Why the Chinese support the Communist party Interviews with four elderly Chinese. Among the answers: "We used to live in a tiny house, over ten people all together, just a place of over ten square metres. Now I often say to my husband that life has been totally different for our grandchildren, not only from ours, but from their parents too. They have nothing to worry about, no need to worry about food, clothes."
posted by shetterly
on Oct 4, 2009 -
52 comments
Imagine you're living in China, trying to work your way out of the family date farming business (which garners approximately $450 annually). You do all the right things. You apply for (and receive)
Communist Party membership. You study literally to the point of collapse, and despite coming from coal-town origins, you score high on your
gao kao ("high test," more-or-less the only thing that matters in getting into a Chinese university). Your already-poor family goes
deep into debt to send you to college, and you even manage to come out with a degree. Classic rise-up-by-your-own-bootstraps tale, right? However, finally, when you go to apply for a job—
your state-sanctioned educational, occupational, and political records are inexplicably, awfully gone. What has happened to that plain manila folder (!) that serves as your only legitimate, official history in Chinese society?
Probably stolen and sold so a party official's child can get everything you worked so hard for. And then,
of course, your family is detained by party officials when your parents demand to know where the hell your life went. Of course.
[more inside]
posted by Keter
on Jul 27, 2009 -
47 comments
At the end of the Korean War,
James Veneris was an American POW awaiting repatriation. But when his time came, he—
along with twenty other Americans and a Briton—declined to leave and chose to cast his lot with Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. Over time, almost all of these men became disillusioned with Marxism and eventually
returned to their homelands. The Cold War that informed their decisions has become a chapter in the history books but the story of Western defectors to the Communist bloc is just now being written.
posted by jason's_planet
on Jan 4, 2007 -
9 comments
Don't be evil. Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet's fastest growing market. Google will roll out a new version of its search engine bearing China's Web suffix ".cn," on Wednesday.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood
on Jan 24, 2006 -
93 comments
Student Attacks Against Teachers: The Revolution of 1966 At the Middle School attached to Beijing Teacher's College, Yu Ruifen, a female biology teacher, was knocked to the ground and beaten in her office. In broad daylight, she was dragged by her legs through the front door and down the steps, her head bumping against the cement; a barrel of boiling water was poured on her. Though she died after approximately two hours of torture, it did not satisfy the students. All other teachers in the "ox-ghost and snake-demon team" were forced to stand around Yu's corpse and take turns beating her.
posted by Kwantsar
on May 2, 2005 -
41 comments
Chinese Communism comes to a (seemingly) screeching halt. Lost in the brouha over Spain was the report that the Chinese National People's Congress voted yesterday to protect private property rights. Some regard this as more symbolic than actually guaranteeing any concrete rights while others believe it is indicative of the growing importance of private business currently fueling the Chinese economy. The words
'Human Rights' were also put into the constitution for the first time.
posted by PenDevil
on Mar 15, 2004 -
9 comments
China.
Abandons Communism. Gets
AIDS. May be about to
lose its shirt. While everybody on the pink side of Ebenezer Scrooge is pissing and moaning about the state of America, here's one American who thinks the state of the Middle Kingdom is at least equally interesting (as in ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times.")
posted by jfuller
on Nov 12, 2002 -
11 comments
The Long March - A Walking Visual Display. "Its aim is to take both contemporary Chinese and international art to a sector of the Chinese public that is rarely, perhaps never, exposed to such work. Specifically, we will bring art to those people who live in communities along the route of Mao Zedong's historic Long March. Mao's 'March' symbolized the deliverance of the Communist ideal to the Chinese proletariat. It is with this symbolism in mind that we now choose to march contemporary art out to China's peripheral population."
via ArtKrush
posted by Stan Chin
on Oct 21, 2002 -
5 comments
Gosh, this is strange: US Congressman Robert Aderholt (R, 4th District of Alabama) wrote to President Clinton asking him to postpone the upcoming visit of the Philippine president to Washington, "citing certain businessmen close to Mr. Estrada with alleged ''strong ties to the communist Chinese.''
The funny thing, for me at least, is that the people the oh-so-smart Rep. Aderholt named aren't just CAPITALISTS, but are among the richest men in Asia!
Errr, since when did having a chinese surname make someone a communist? And doesn't China have most favored trading status with the US anyway?
posted by lia
on Jul 10, 2000 -
17 comments
