ChinaGeeks

It’s amazing how fast China blogs grow old. ChinaGeeks is over half a year old now, and still the Western media hasn’t sat us down to have “the talk” about where quotations come from. Maybe it’s time they did.

There has been some discussion about Thoman Friedman’s most recent op-ed, “Our One-Party Democracy“. In it, he compares China to the US favorably, arguing that China’s autocratic system is more efficient and responsive:
There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party [...]

Apparently. According to the Middle Eastern Media Research Institute, not everyone is content with blaming the WUC or the CCP for the riots in Xinjiang last month, so the Syrian government has introduced a new three-letter acronym to blame: USA.
From the article (an editorial in the state-owned Al-Thawra):
While the G-8 countries were preparing for their [...]

You may have seen our recent post about how netizens at Anti-CNN have been up in arms about the misleading captions of recent New York Times web slideshows. Yesterday, they dove into the text of an actual article, pulling it apart for its’ so-called unfair coverage.
Sentence by sentence, Anti-CNN questions the Times’s wording by inserting [...]

The Anti-CNN folks are up in arms again, so much so that their webmaster has written a news story about it in English. This time, the target of their displeasure is the New York Times, who apparently edited photo captions for photos of the riots in Xinjiang. The photos came with captions from the Associated Press, Reuters, and the Agence France Presse, but Anti-CNN has discovered that the Times edited those captions, in some cases giving the photos improper context and in other cases making them downright wrong.

There is nowhere on earth we can learn about or read about without bias, but even given the assumption that bias exists everywhere, China might be the worst country in the world to attempt to study if you’re trying to assess the veracity of anything remotely controversial.

From time to time, ChinaGeeks gets requests from readers or whoever that we link a blog post of theirs. Generally, we do check out these links, although we don’t often end up linking them. Today, we will be linking one, although I fear it’s not the kind of endorsement the woman who emailed us was [...]

With the anniversary of June 4th now passed, relatively without incident, I was hoping to move on to other topics, but I came across this op-ed piece in the New York Times and, well, here we are.
In it, Nicholas Kristof (the Times’s Beijing Bureau Chief in 1989) recounts his experiences in Beijing on the [...]

I have always considered it rather unfortunate that the one part of Chinese history most Americans know something about — the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 — happens to be a part that many Chinese know little about. Granted, American knowledge doesn’t tend run very deep, people just know that students were killed, and they [...]

From the Economist’s May 2nd blog post: “Do recent events and the extraordinary growth of China prove quasi-capitalism with lots of government manipulation work [better than the laissez-faire American system]?” Given the political bent of this magazine, it is no surprise that the blog writer answers with a resounding “No.” Looking closer at the post, however, the Economist’s logic proves to be inconsistent.