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Chinese Tuesdays: Calligraphy robot

So jealous of this robot. H/t Chinese Hacks.

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While The Clouds Blow In From The South

A new poem by Rob Schackne

 

Inner Mongolia or Nei Menggu

shares an international border

with Mongolia (of course) and Siberian Russia

it stretches almost two and a half thousand kilometres

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“Life is an Internet Café”

A chance encounter in the middle of nowhere, by Cobus Block

 

I met her on a crosswalk in Yiwu, eastern China. Traffic was thick and we were both stranded between lanes. As I searched down the street for a gap in the oncoming vehicles, I noticed she was watching me. She caught my eye and, instead of looking away, smirked and shook her head.

“It’s crowded,” I broke the ice.

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Chinese Tuesdays: The bystander effect

 

There’s a phrase "一个和尚挑水吃,两个和尚抬水吃,三个和尚没水吃"*. It means “one monk can carry drinking water [balancing a pole and buckets on his back], two monks can carry drinking water [lifting the buckets together], three monks have no water to drink." It can refer to the diluted sense of responsibility felt by people in crowds to take action, or to encourage you to be self-reliant.

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China's "golden age"

A Q&A with sci fi novelist Chan Koonchung

 

Chan Koonchung is the Shanghai born, Hong Kong raised author of The Fat Years, a near-future soft science fiction novel about a China closely resembling today’s. He has now been living in Beijing since 2000. In his book, China has entered a “Golden Age of Ascendancy”, after a second economic crisis has crippled the West. But no-one within China can remember the crackdown that preceded it, and everyone is oddly and unnaturally euphoric.

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