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Bits and bobs

  • Yours truly and his humble blog gets a mention from Jeffrey Wasserstrom at the end of his latest Huffington Post article, ‘Illuminating and Misleading Takes on China 20 Years Since Tiananmen‘. Whether I am illuminating or misleading I will leave unclarified for greater suspense.
  • I saw Nanjing! Nanjing! the other night in Beida’s packed-to-the-rafters auditorium. I can assure you from the atmosphere at the screening that anger at the Japanese runs deep in this generation, as it has in previous ones. Mind you, the mouth-to-mouth memory of the war seems to have faded enough to allow one group of students a couple of rows behind me laugh blindly at the comedy of a Japanese officer struggling to pull up his trousers … after raping a Chinese girl.
  • School’s out for summer, and in a couple of hours – oh joy – I will be boarding a 40 hour train to Kunming. During two weeks traveling in Yunnan and Sichuan, blogging is likely to be thinner than the air at Shangri La.