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Via Boing Boing, Ethan Persoff's website of political and counterculture cartoons (and other interesting things) has an excellent gallery of 35 late '50s and early '60s Chinese political cartoons. Unfortunately the cartoons are not translated, but the images generally speak for themselves. If you're interested in Chinese propaganda art or Cold War ...

Two or three weeks ago the New Yorker carried a good article by Evan Osnos on the phenomenon of China's ''angry youth'' (fenqing). Much of the article was a profile of one young man in particular. In truth, he sounds more passionate than angry. It's worth reading the whole thing, but there was one section I found particularly interesting:When ...

Beijing residents may know that a few weeks ago there was something of a rough spell for local English language magazines. The local version of entertainment magazine Time Out was shut down at least temporarily for mysterious reasons. Also, the publishers of That's Beijing yanked the trademark away from True Run Media, who had actually managed the ...

My colleague was downstairs at the Olympic souvenir stand in the mall when she spotted this notebook and bookmark set featuring Jing Jing, one of the five ''Fuwa'' mascots of the Beijing Olympics. Shooting is an Olympic sport (and several of the Olympic sports have military antecedents), so this makes sense from a certain perspective. ...

And yet another NPC symptom: bureaucrats are saying ridiculous things. From Xinhua. Read the whole thing before I get stuck in:Regulator: China not to implement film rating for the momentBEIJING, March 4 (Xinhua) -- China won't adopt a film rating system for the moment, the publications watchdog said.Liu Binjie, General Administration of Press and ...

Despite years as a college radio DJ, Imagethief has never had much time for Bjork. I find her pretentious to a degree not entirely compensated for by talent. But, then, I think the future of pop music died when Led Zep broke up, so you may want to control for my tastes. Despite my inclination to be dismissive of all things Bjorkish, I was ...

There is no such thing as a dull year in China. 2008 is well underway and already looks like another whopper. We're only a month in and we've already had the biggest storms in half a century. The Olympics, the mother of all China events, is now a scant seven months off. God only knows what will happen in between. But before we get too far into ...

When Imagethief read the words ''model truss'' in the headline of an article on China.org.cn, he had an immediate flashback to the hernia repair operation he had nine or ten years ago. In fact, I never needed a truss (it wasn't that bad a hernia), but I do have a Dacron patch in my abdomen to this day. Or so they tell me. It turned out to have ...

A few weeks ago, when Tim Burroughs of China Economic Review sent me his quarterly reminder that I had a column to write, YouTube was still being blocked. It seemed like a shoo-in topic. By the time I started writing the column, however, YouTube was (thankfully) unblocked again. That rather took the edge off the topic, but I wrote the column ...

Imagethief has rather a sweet tooth. Hence my long acquaintance with the gym and the pleasures of the long run. One of China's under-appreciated pleasures is the enamel-stripping joy of a chewy White Rabbit Milk Candy. I'm not the first to be smitten, as a quick Googling will reveal. White Rabbit even has a Wikipedia entry. My friends are aware ...