CEO Eric Xu said the telecom giant's Shenzhen headquarters conducted "business as usual" after media reports that the U.S. National Security Agency had hacked company executives' communications.
Southern California-based Laszlo Montgomery is the creator and presenter of the China History Podcast. Montgomery began studying Mandarin and Chinese history in 1979 at the University of Illinois. For twenty-five years, he has worked for China consumer product manufacturers, helping them build market shares in the U.S. Part of his China career brought him to Hong Kong for nine years beginning in 1989. Usually the sole Westerner in the Chinese company, Montgomery learned early on the benefits and importance of building bridges and appreciating the good things about China and Chinese culture.
After receiving inspiration from the early pioneers of the history podcasting genre, Montgomery launched the China History Podcast in June 2010, about the same time as the first Sinica Podcast. From his home in Claremont, California, he produces a steady flow of podcast episodes that introduce topics from Chinese history covering the most ancient and mythical times to the present day.
Montgomery divides his time between writing and producing the China History Podcast from Claremont, California and advising Chinese companies in the U.S.
This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are delighted to host Mark O’Neill, author of The Chinese Labour Corps, for a discussion of the Chinese contribution to World War One.
Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning American film director with Taiwan roots, and Zhang Yimou, the storied veteran of mainland Chinese moviemaking, joined together on March 27 at Cooper Union in New York in a discussion billed “Chinese Film, Chinese Confidence” by Zhang’s backer, LeVision Pictures.
Asia faces a worsening water crisis, according to a leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Water demand from rising populations and living standards, and poor management—in addition to climate change—will increase the scarcity of freshwater for large portions of Asia, says the summary of the IPCC Working Group II report, due to be published on March 31.
On Monday, March 24, a thirteen-year veteran of Bloomberg News, Ben Richardson, news editor at large for Asia, resigned.
Investors, ready your wallets.
On June 6, 1946, at 5pm, after stepping out of the office of the Democratic Weekly, Wen Yiduo died in a hail of bullets. Mao blamed the Nationalists and transformed Wen into a paragon of the revolution.
Wen was born into a well-to-do family in Hubei, China, and received a classical education. But he came of age as old imperial China and its institutions were being swept away, and the Chinese people were looking ahead to a new China. It was fertile ground for a young poet.
In 1922, Wen came to the U.S. and studied art and literature at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was during this period that his first collection of poetry was published, Hongzu or “Red Candle.” He returned to China in 1925 and took a position as a university professor and became active in the political and aesthetic debates of the time. His second collection of poems, Sishui, rendered by previous translators as “Dead Water,” was published in 1928.
As political trends shifted from an intellectual, elitist base toward a populist one, changes in literature were just as pervasive. Wen was one of the leaders of a movement to reform Chinese poetry—hitherto written in a classical style with a diction and rhetoric so far removed from everyday usage that it had segregated itself from all but the wealthy and the well educated—by adapting common speech and direct observation, while maintaining a strict, albeit new, formalism.
However, Wen never resolved the conflicts that existed within him: The elitist and the proletarian, the scholar and the activist, the traditionalist and the innovator, the personal man and the public man, fought for ascendancy. Yet it was these contradictions that proved so fruitful and give his poetry its singular power. —Bright City Books
David Bandurski is co-director of the China Media Project and editor of the project’s website. He is currently a fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village, a book of reportage about urbanization in China (Penguin Random House, 2015), and co-author of Investigative Journalism in China, a book of eight cases on Chinese watchdog journalism. In addition to his work with the China Media Project, David is a producer of Chinese independent films through his Hong Kong production company, Lantern Films. His latest feature production, Nailhouse, is currently in post-production.
On March 18, thousands of students began a sit-in of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan in the capital, Taipei, a historic first that has paralyzed the island’s lawmaking body. Students have amassed to protest an attempt by the Kuomintang, the island’s ruling party, to push through a trade pact with China.
