With Ai Weiwei still missing in action, and dozens of other government undesirables, such as activists and rights lawyers also disappearing, it’s no wonder that the director of the Songzhuang Documentary Film Festival got cold feet. Zhu Rikun told...
Ten years in the making and with a price tag of US$400m, the freshly-opened National Museum of China on the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square may be the world’s biggest museum. Unarguably grand architecturally, its permanent exhibition on China’s...
The Chinese authorities detained dissident artist Ai Weiwei more than a week ago. Yesterday, Ai’s wife Lu Qing, also an artist, spoke to Justin Webb on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme about her husband’s arrest, saying that they have no reason to...
Outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has joined the ranks of other dissidents who have irked the government. He has simply gone missing. Police detained Ai at Beijing Airport on Sunday, as he was en route to Hong Kong. His Beijing studio was also...
The fear comes in not knowing. This is something Geng He, the wife of Gao Zhisheng, a Chinese rights lawyer who disappeared on April 10 last year, well knows. Geng wrote a touching appeal in the New York Times today calling attention to her...
For the past few weeks Chinese users have been frequently struggling with access to Gmail and two days ago Google accused the government of disturbing its email service. "This is a government blockage, carefully designed to look like the problem is...
China’s phantom Jasmine pro-democracy protests have turned into a news story about news journalists. The heavy-handed treatment of foreign reporters --- detained in an underground bunker, shadowed, beaten, harassed and threatened --- has now become...
Censorship and its fear-fed sibling, self-censorship, frequently take on farcical qualities in China. One of the most eloquent speeches on this subject for a long time was given by a young Chinese writer, Murong Xuecun, last week. The 30-something...
An appeal to replicate Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" in 13 cities across China over the weekend has flopped spectacularly. There was little sign of any demonstration, just huge crowds of police, journalists and onlookers at the proposed sites in...
China’s Global Times Chinese edition is well known for being a nationalist paper owned by the Communist Party. The Chinese edition is often peppered with official jargon and an attitude to Western countries that can be summarized as a pugnacious...