The Blue Sky Map app, which was officially launched April 28 by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), enables the public to check up on air and water quality and local sources of pollution, and scrutinize emissions from 9,000 polluting companies.
The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs involved. Fantasy Islands probes Chinese, European, and American eco-desire and eco-technological dreams, and examines the solutions they offer to environmental degradation in this age of global economic change.
Uncovering the stories of sites in China, including the plan for a new eco-city called Dongtan on the island of Chongming, mega-suburbs, and the Shanghai World Expo, Julie Sze explores the flows, fears, and fantasies of Pacific Rim politics that shaped them. She charts how climate change discussions align with U.S. fears of China’s ascendancy and the related demise of the American Century, and she considers the motives of financial and political capital for eco-city and ecological development supported by elite power structures in the U.K. and China. Fantasy Islands shows how ineffectual these efforts are while challenging us to see what a true eco-city would be. —University of California Press
Fred Pearce, New Scientist (January 26, 2015)
Michael Veale, LSE Review of Books (January, 3, 2015)
Mark Clifford, Asian Review of Books (January 19, 2015)
On April 28, American pop singer Katy Perry gave her first-ever concert in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, the self-governing island which mainland China considers to be its sovereign territory. Tense relations between Taiwan and mainland China mean that celebrities visiting Taiwan must often perform a balancing act—pleasing the island’s crowds while not offending mainland sensibilities.
New deposit insurance could shake the public’s faith in the long-held belief in failsafe government bailouts.
Shinzo Abe denounced for not repeating previous PMs’ apologies for Japan using sex slaves during second world war.
Coal miners in Huaibei, in northern Anhui province, pose for photographer Xie Zhengyi, a member of the photo agency CPressphoto. This city of two million sits atop an estimated 2.726 million tons of coal, as well as other mineral reserves.
Mingwei Huang is conducting an interdisciplinary study of the contemporary spectacular reemergence of Sino-African relations, particularly Sino-African friendship, in South Africa. She is focusing on how the geopolitics of diplomatic “friendship” and transnational capital flows between China and South Africa are localized in the everyday encounters and friendships between Chinese migrants, South Africans, and African migrants in South Africa. She researches how friendship and capital are linked through productive sentiments such as amity and trust in addition to everyday social practices of exchange and transactions. In so doing, she conceptualizes how friendship and capital are mutually constitutive in a “political economy of friendship” and a local “friendship economy” in commercial spaces of transnational capital. Through ethnographic, historical, cultural, and media studies methods, Huang examines three Sino-African capital and cultural flows vis-à-vis friendship: mass Chinese tourism in Cape Town, China Malls—Chinese-import shopping malls—in Johannesburg, and PRC sponsored cultural diplomacy events in South Africa. Her research theoretically contributes to anthropological approaches to friendship, capital, globalization, and “south-south” relations.
Obama said a strong U.S.-Japan alliance should not be seen as a provocation to China.
A devastating earthquake has struck one of China’s smallest neighbors, the mountainous former kingdom known, since 2008, as the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal. Surrounded on three sides by India—known in Nepali as a “friendly nation”—Nepal these days feels an outsized influence from China, on its fourth border, which it historically called just “neighboring country.” Today, Nepal’s tourism industry caters increasingly to Chinese sightseers and mountain climbers.
As long as Japan refuses to face WWII atrocities, the world community will never loosen the screw.
