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Chinese bloggers flooded Sina Weibo with expressions of sympathy and grief after news broke about the Boston bombing, and that one of the casualties was a Chinese grad student. While many took the opportunity to mourn, many other bloggers couldn’t help but admire and critique how the US handled the situation. My report for LinkAsia [...]
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Campaigns to abolish the oft-maligned reeducation-through-labor camp have been gathering steam on the Chinese social media in the past few years and even made their way into the agenda at China’s annual political meetings, for the reeduation system is often seen to be an extrajudicial punishment that have emboldened local authorities to jail and torture [...]
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This is a visual story I wrote and helped edit (with some tweaks made by the great video editor at LinkAsia program) for LinkAsia, aired this past Sunday on Link TV and a number of PBS-affliated stations in the United States. I know I am not a cameragenic person:P I am especially clumsy with makeup. [...]
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Source: Sina Weibo Tech giant Apple and German automaker Volkswagen were accused of jerking Chinese consumers around in a 3-hour expose aired by China Central Television Friday evening, but a celebrity’s foolish mistake on Weibo revealed that the so-called investigative journalism from CCTV was nothing but the big shark’s PR offensive against the wrong targets. [...]
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Sources: Xinmin Evening News, CRI We don’t know yet if the polluted water has killed too many pigs, or too many dead pigs have polluted the water, but the sight of over 1,200 bodies of domesticated pigs floating with tons of garbage and flotsam in Songjiang River, which has the city of Shanghai downsteam and [...]
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Source: Seattle Times, Sing Tao Daily A 19-year-old Chinese community college student is facing homicide charge after killing a 25-year-old woman in a fatal car crash in November. His mother flew to the U.S. from China and paid two million dollars in bail last week. Chinese social media are now abuzz with condemnation of such [...]
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Due to my family’s relocation plan, I am now looking for a job in the United States. I figure while I will be sending out application packages every day, it does not hurt if I advertise myself here, since we already have thousands of followers. If you have been a Ministry of Tofu reader for [...]
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Chinese-made anti-Japanese patriotic television dramas have been the object of an awful lot of ridicule on Sina Weibo, the Chinese twitter, after netizens found much to their amusement that in one extreme example, a Chinese man tears up a “Japanese soldier”, or commonly known in China as “Japanese devil”, across like a piece of paper, [...]
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As complaints over the severe baby formula shortage in Hong Kong rise, the local authorities plan to slap a tough restriction on the amount of formula outbound travellers can take. The new rule, which is aimed at mainland Chinese smugglers, has sparked fear, outrage and angst on Chinese social media. Under the regulation, each individual [...]
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Two elderly gay men living in Beijing find themselves in the center of controversy after their high-profile coming out on the web is as much censured as praised. The two men, one a retired teacher and the other a rural migrant working as a water bottle deliverer, created a profile page named “Two Old Men’s [...]
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Jazza John, our contributor, is currently a student at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. A report from Reporters Without Boarders suggests that freedom of the press in both Hong Kong and Taiwan has dropped. The Press Freedom Index, which is compiled of 179 nations, showed Hong Kong drop from 54 to 58 and Taiwan from 45 to 48, while [...]
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Chris Toepker is a contributor to Ministry of Tofu. He hails from the United States, has been living in greater China since 1990 and has recently relocated to Beijing. All too often, visitors to Beijing fret and cluck their tongues at the air pollution. While it certainly is awful, clearing the air is certainly no simple [...]
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Recently, a magical popcorn cooker from China has piqued Americans’ curiosity. The old-fashioned Chinese popcorn cooker is essentially a cannon with a handle. MythBuster, a famous show on America’s Discovery Channel, uses it to explore the fastest way to make popcorn. The production team spent much time on figuring out the monster, put up a [...]
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As the Spring Festival travel season, also known as the largest annual human migration in the world, approaches, the vexing and taxing battle for a train ticket home starts. This year, a new problem occurs: tech-savvy Chinese ticket buyers have been using plug-ins, add-ons and other software applications, which causes a surge in traffic that [...]
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Five weeks after a lengthy chronicle of his sexual encounters with a woman went viral on the Chinese Internet, Yi Junqing, a high-ranking official, was fired for “improper lifestyle,” according to a terse news dispatch from the state-run Xinhua News Agency on January 17. Yi Junqing, director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, has [...]
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Chris Toepker is a contributor to Ministry of Tofu. He hails from the United States, has been living in greater China since 1990 and has recently relocated to Beijing. After so many years in greater China, I thought I had things straight. Sadly, my first-time, full-time working in Beijing apparently presents many new opportunities to learn. [...]
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Note: Gil Hizi is Ministry of Tofu’s contributor. He is also the chief editor of website Thinking Chinese. Numerous elder Chinese have a desire to remain fit and to nurture health. Some of them even fulfill this need by swimming in icy lakes and pushing the body to efforts that it had doubtfully met even in [...]
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Statistics show that at least 13 million abortions are performed each year in China, which makes it the country with the highest number of abortions in the world. That does not include the 10 million abortion pills sold or the unknown number of abortions performed at underground or unregistered clinics. Against the backdrop of the country’s One Child Policy, abortion in China is not only legal but casually done. Besides, to unmarried women, the social stigma of raising an illegitimate child and the lack of adoption services means that having an abortion after getting pregnant is almost the only way out.
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Jazza John, Ministry of Tofu contributor, helped with the story. On the same day, tragedies descended upon both a Chinese and an American elementary schools. Chinese news media, like their American counterparts, blanketed their front pages and prime-time news programs with coverage of the Connecticut shooting on December 16, while playing down or even clamming [...]
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In a talk show aired on Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV Monday, Jackie Chan, the world-famous actor and show-biz star, said that China is not the country with the most serious corruption problem; the United States is. He also called on Chinese people to refrain from criticizing the China, especially in front of “outsiders”. The remarks [...]
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