“One Sunday morning, when the animals assembled to receive their orders, Napoleon announced that he had decided upon a new policy. … The four young pigs who had protested … were promptly silenced by a tremendous growling from the dogs. … Napoleon … announced that he had already made all the arrangements.” (George Orwell, Animal […]
Bin was a 25-year-old young man from a northern province in China. From 2007 to 2008, he was lucky to be selected by the Chinese government and sent to the United States to teach Mandarin Chinese at a high school in Belpre, a small city in Ohio, with a population of 6,500. I met Bin […]
On January 18, 2017, Genova, only one of the gates to the sprawling Palais de Nations (Palace of the United Nations) remained open. There were long lines for security checks. Junior staff at the UN were drafted to escort the 200 members of the Chinese delegation accompanying the Chinese President Xi into the building. The […]
The street in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. will be renamed “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” if a new bill to that effect can be passed by Congress. This symbolic move is meant to honor a human rights activist, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was put in jail for years by the Chinese […]
Ms. Yang Shuping, a senior graduate from the University of Maryland, recently delivered the commencement speech at her graduation. She said she grew up in a city in China where she had to wear a face mask every time she went outside, otherwise she might get sick. However, the moment she arrived in the United […]
(I would like to express my special thanks to the American Bar Association and Carolina Academic Press for kindly providing me with a review copy of Mr. Gao’s memoir. This blog is the first part of my book review of “Unwavering Convictions: Gao Zhisheng’s Ten-Year Torture and Faith in China’s Future.”) Mr. Gao Zhisheng, the […]
My friend David loves to tell me how his family enjoys the Christmas season and how it is his wife’s most wonderful time of the year – their children come home and their house is filled with joyful laughter. David’s home represents how millions of ordinary American families celebrate and enjoy Christmas in the United […]
On a burning hot summer morning, in South-central China Hubei Province, approximately three hundred community schoolteachers (non-public schoolteachers) gathered in front of the City Government office building, sitting quietly and pleading with the government to fulfill a promise made decades ago. The government promised that each year, from 1996 to 1998, 500 community schoolteachers would […]
Chinese mental hospitals have an euphemistic name: “Ankang”, which literally means “peace and health.” “Peace and Health” hospitals are psychiatric institutions, all of which are administered by China’s Ministry of Public Security, and rumor has it there are about 22 across the country (Lubman, 2016). Ankang hospitals are controlled by the police and used by […]
The Chinese government recently put out a video titled “If you wanted China to be changed like those (countries, such as Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Libya and Turkey), please walk all over us.” After presenting images of war-torn countries, the video argues that “behind all these things, we can see the deep shadow of the star-spangled […]