Search Results for: China

Aftershocks: A Nation Bears the Unbearable

Longreads Pick

To geologists, earthquakes are a constant in the planet’s eternal becoming. To the Japanese, they are simply a constant. In a given year, there can be hundreds, usually barely discernible micro-events. They rattle the pictures on the wall, the china on the table, but they rarely stop the conversation. Donald Keene, a professor at Columbia and the dean of Japanese-literature scholars, said, “Very often, when I have been away from Japan for a while and come back, there will be a small earthquake, and I notice it and no one else in the room does. They laugh at me.” He added, “People expect this all the time, that they will be warned. But when a quake of great magnitude happens they are shocked. The world changes.”

Author: Evan Osnos
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,702 words)

North Korea’s Digital Underground

Longreads Pick

Their work is illegal and extremely dangerous, and it is producing results. In December 2009, for example, one reporter for the Daily NK, a Web site based in Seoul, embarrassed Pyongyang by intercepting a copy of Kim Jong Il’s annual message, a critical document that sets the ideological tone for the year, before it appeared in North Korea’s official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun. This past December, Open Radio North Korea, a broadcast-news organization, broke the story that a train headed for Pyongyang with gifts from China for Kim Jong Un, the heir apparent, was reportedly sabotaged and derailed, in one of several sporadic and mostly unreported acts of resistance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 8, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,338 words)

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

From 1948: Pearl Harbor in Retrospect

Anyone who has lived through the global bubble and bust of the last few years may wonder what’s so great about a consumer society. In the United States, the idea that we have reoriented our economy toward consumption and don’t make things anymore has become a standard lament, not a sign of progress. But China is a long way from consuming too much. Saying that China does not have a big-enough consumer economy is really another way of saying that not enough of its resources reach the broad mass of its people. If they had more resources, they would surely spend more. This is why the recent labor strikes, and the pay increases that followed, were so important. They were a sign that Chinese households might start to enjoy more of the fruits of the long boom.

Dirty Coal, Clean Future

Longreads Pick

To environmentalists, “clean coal” is an insulting oxymoron. But for now, the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal—dirty, sooty, toxic coal—in more-sustainable ways. The good news is that new technologies are making this possible. China is now the leader in this area, the Google and Intel of the energy world.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Nov 9, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,217 words)

The Next Empire

Longreads Pick

All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built, ports deepened, commercial contracts signed—all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose appetite for commodities seems insatiable.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 2010
Length: 26 minutes (6,656 words)

Cyber Warriors

Longreads Pick

When will China emerge as a military threat to the U.S.? In most respects the answer is: not anytime soon—China doesn’t even contemplate a time it might challenge America directly. But one significant threat already exists: cyberwar.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 1, 2010
Length: 8 minutes (2,177 words)

Gutenberg and How Typography Is Like Music

Longreads Pick

Typography has a visceral and direct effect on everybody who reads. It can inhibit or enhance the feel of reading without being consciously noticeable. It does so by combining specific visuals that echo cultural memories, which are hopefully servile to the words they spell. Not unlike your favorite food tasting better on fine china then on paper plates, the choice of typeface can radically impact meaning while hopefully going consciously unnoticed. Try to exhort that indefinable magic in words, and you may as well be doing that over-quoted dance about architecture.

Source: McSweeney’s
Published: Nov 6, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,590 words)

The Snakehead

Longreads Pick

The criminal odyssey of Chinatown’s Sister Ping.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 24, 2006
Length: 32 minutes (8,098 words)

Tiananmen Story

Longreads Pick

It was so frustrating. It was early May, 1989 and I was in Tokyo reporting the financial markets for Reuters, fiddling around journalistically with the peak of the Japanese bubble economy. Meanwhile in China, cataclysmic events were unfolding and I wasn’t there. I really wanted to get back to see it and live it.

Source: Earnshaw.com
Published: Jun 28, 2009
Length: 39 minutes (9,771 words)