It is July, which in China means the gaokao is frequently featured in the headlines. Outside of the country, the short story about the “highest exam” is often that this is where the fate of millions of students is determined by a single number in a national contest. This isn’t exactly wrong, but the gaokao [ ]
When my parents visited us in England, one day my then 3-year-old son had a minor viral infection and a fever. We took him to the GP and, as expected, were told to give him paracetamol and monitor. My mother, like a good Chinese grandmother would, insisted he should get antibiotics. I explained it was [ ]
My father was a grassroots bureaucrat who hung out with other grassroots bureaucrats. A few years ago I attended a family banquet, as you usually would when returning home after being away for some time. There would usually be relatives who were grassroots bureaucrats. They were talking about local politics and policies at some point. [ ]
Editor note: I came across this article, first published in 2017, on the debate around that time over whether China is socialist or capitalist, and whether it s imperialist, among the Chinese left. The author themselves argues that China is capitalist and imperialist, but they introduce and present a range of different views from academics and [ ]
When I began to listen carefully to my mother's ghost stories, I found out that they were all about girls who died wronged, killed by poverty and patriarchy, and whose misfortunes cast long shadows in the hearts of the girls who survived
On why re-examining our “dialects” is about resisting hierarchies, opposing discrimination, and pursuing linguistic justice, rather than cultural “orthodoxy”.
When I try to think through why Xiaohongshu as a platform has always felt weird to me, I realize that it might just be a reflection of what the internet would look like if the logic of contentification completely dominates how we interact with others and perform ourselves online. If platforms have a language, just [ ]
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I doubt if I ll have time for any serious blogging here but for now I might use this place for organizing and recollecting some of my tweets or, fragments of thought in the time of fragmentation. Today s theme is politics and the Chinese language, including political newspeak , internet slang terms, and some other stuff. [ ]