This evening I and a friend braved the crowds and headed down to Tiananmen Square, the closest thing that a communist country can have to a sacred space. On the north side of the square is the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tian-an Men). To the south sits Qianmen Gate, and since 1979, the Mosoleum […]
Mirror Site
This is a friendly reminder that I have a mirror site. For those of you new to this site, who are outside of China (on the safe side of the Great Firewall of China), you can read pre-September entries at: http://www.outside-in.blog-city.com.
Happy Birthday, China
Today (October 1, 2005–I’m in a different time zone) is the 56h birthday of the People’s Republic of China. But wait, you say, I thought China was an ancient civilazation with 5000 years of history! Well, that’s true, but the nation that we know today was founded 49 years ago, when Chairman Mao stood atop […]
Health Club
I bit the bullet and joined a health club this week. There’s one across the street from my housing complex (upstairs from the Hypermarket), so it really couldn’t be more convenient. Really, it’s just a gym — a large room with treadmills, torture contraptions that supposedly sculpt muscles, and a room for aerobics. Over the […]
Don’t Stand on Ceremony
This morning I attended a ceremony on the campus of Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). The ceremony was to celebrate the 65th anniversay of the founding of BIT, one of China’s major universities of science and technology. Many former and current goverment leaders in China are graduates of this university, so they pulled out all […]
Collective Punishment, Chinese Style
This is something I wrote a year ago, but it’s still a good read: I live in a private housing development on the west side of Beijing. Private housing developments are a relatively new phenomenon in this "socialist" country, but they are beginning to sprout up around town (like weeds, actually, and with funny names, […]
