Author Archives: Alice Xin Liu

A chaotic Lantern Festival

The Shanxi Youth Daily has a front page showing celebrations for the Lantern Festival from yesterday, describing the chaotic antics in Shanxi. A side headline stresses that many post-80s are unable to go back to work without feeling sleepy and lethargic: some feel tired during the day but can’t sleep at night.

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Advertising some prime real estate in Fuzhou

An ad acts as a wrapper of the Fuzhou Evening News. The real estate advert is for a Wanda Plaza in Fuzhou, and the title reads “Quality refurbished SOHO: a new work unit will be launched soon.”

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Liaoning Evening News’ tabloid headlines

The report about taking grandma to university tells the story of Guan Wandong (管万东) who studies at Liaoning Normal University. With one parent dead and another who is ill, his sick grandma doesn’t have enough money to cure her different illnesses, including a slightly deformed leg.

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Tales of Old Hong Kong

The new Tales of Old Hong Kong compiled by Derek Sandhaus is available at Earnshaw Books.

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Diamond Hill by Feng Chi-shun

Feng’s memoir Diamond Hill describes an era of gambling and gangsters, Suzie Wong and squatter villages, fires and food stalls, and the Kowloon Walled City and its white powder. “A time when people were poor, but life was rich,” he says. The world that he grew up in no longer exists, but his book – the first ever on the Diamond Hill refugee settlement, in either Chinese or English – offers a candid picture of what life was like for most Hong Kong residents in the 1950s.

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Rumors and follow-up for Tianjin bus incident

Since Monday rumors have been flying about the cause of the incident, including the suspect’s brother iterating that Zhang Yimin, the suspect, reported that his wife and daughter had been kidnapped to the bathing center opposite his residential complex. Today, The Beijing News follows up with interviews with neighbors and a call-in reader who wanted to verify some details in their earlier report.

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Tianjin bus attack kills 9, injures 11

The local government has affirmed that yesterday morning in Tianjin’s CBD are there occurred a malicious bus attack incident, the suspect Zhang Yimin (张义民) drove a bus down on many roads hitting and rolling people over. At present there are 9 dead, and 11 injured. The injured includes 4 police.

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Fan Lixin’s Last Train Home: why film unhappy things?

Canadian citizen Fan Lixin (范立欣) has made a documentary that spans the years 2007 to 2009, focusing on an old couple’s journey back to Guang’an city, Huilong village (回龙村) in Sichuan from the factories of Guangzhou. The documentary, made with over one million dollars in funding, will have wide release in foreign countries…

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Xinjiang text messaging: spreading rumors and criminal detention

Not long after partial Internet was restored to Xinjiang, and text messaging was restored on January 17, a report emerged about criminal detentions of different people using text message to spread “harmful” information, affecting ethnic unity. Xinjiang Tianshannet (新疆天山网) reports.

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William A. Callahan’s China: The Pessoptimist Nation

China: The Pessoptimist Nation shows how the heart of Chinese foreign policy is not a security dilemma, but an identity dilemma. Through a careful analysis of how Chinese people understand their new place in the world, the book charts how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings in a dynamic that intertwines China’s domestic and international politics.

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