THE CHINESE LANGUAGE has a way of transforming the familiar into the off-kilter. A location like Wyoming, for example, mutates into Wai Er Ming. The line between the uncommon and the mundane is easily breached when languages, cultures, and peoples collide. And it is these transgressions that tie together the wide-ranging chapters of Strange Stones:…
More
Super Power? The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare And India’s Tortoise By Raghav Bahl
The one constant in the surfeit of recent India-China comparisons is the abundant use of animal-related cliches—tigers, dragons, elephants and peacocks, dancing, lumbering or prancing about. Media guru Raghav Bahl’s debut book, Super Power?, adds to this pantheon by framing his analysis as a race between China’s hare and India’s tortoise. The purpose of Bahl’s…
More
When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts
One way of framing the complexity of China’s long history is to understand it as the interplay of ideas between the pragmatic, human-centric precepts of Confucianism and the nature-worshipping, harmony-seeking philosophy of Daoism. This dichotomy between values that stress conquering nature for human benefit and those that emphasise the importance of seeking a sustainable balance…
More
China’s Olympic Run
BEIJING: For seven years the Beijing Olympics have provided the over-arching umbrella under which Chinese authorities have sheltered while pushing through some of the most sweeping transformations of a society the world has seen. With traditional beliefs like Confucianism having been battered by decades of communist struggle and in turn socialism’s egalitarian ideals punctured by…
More
Why Beijing Can’t Grasp Tibet
BEIJING - Over the past three decades, the Chinese leadership has proven remarkably responsive to changing circumstances. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has displayed a pragmatism and flexibility that has allowed it to retain power, even as the Iron Curtain of the former Soviet Union was torn down along large parts of China's…
More
China Through Indian Eyes
FIVE years was a decent slice of time to spend in a country and I had used it relatively well: travelling and asking questions. But as I geared up to draw a curtain across my China-life, I was increasingly being called upon to answer a few questions as well. ‘Where was China heading?’ people would…
More
Water woes
For millennia China's great rivers have snaked their long meandering courses across the country, providing lifeblood for Chinese civilisation. Along the banks of the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze to the south, five thousand years of history and culture have unfolded, with agriculture flourishing in otherwise inhospitable terrain and trade bringing prosperity…
More
It’s Olympics Time: Rains Can Wait
AFTER WEEKS of watching the mercury soar, hardening the already cracked earth of their wilting orchards and farms, several farmers gather in the Fragrant Hills that line the western fringe of Beijing. Unlike their ancestors they do not assemble to perform a rain dance or to pray to the Buddha for rain. Instead, they grab…
More
Postcard from Macau
On either side, the ocean, inky blue in the gathering twilight rises up as the plane noses downwards straight into the hungry, open mouth of the water. When we touch down on solid earth its miraculous, as though Moses himself had returned to part the ocean. In fact we have landed on a narrow strip…
More
Rags to Rolls Royces: Huaxi’s story
ROW AFTER row of two storey mansions with shingled roofs, stucco walls, and the occasional mock Tudor turret. A picture perfect slice of American suburbia, except only a few metres to the south of this idyll the smokestacks of steel works belch out black vaporous clouds while to its north the Great Wall of China…
More