China is opening up, slowly, by fits and starts

Some of you may have followed the news about protests against censorship at Southern Weekend, one of the more independent-minded Chinese publications. A New Year's Day editorial that called for political reform was rewritten to praise the current system.

Angry netizens took to the Chinese Twitter, called Weibo, to support the protest and express their displeasure with the censorship.

The New Yorker's Evan Osnos noted that among them was the actress Yao Chen, who has 31 million followers on Weibo. She included this quote: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

Osnos said, "When a Chinese ingénue, beloved for her comedy, doe-eyed looks, and middle-class charm, is tweeting her fans the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we may be seeing a new relationship between technology, politics, and Chinese prosperity."

Impressions of China

Pickup games at Tsinghua, from October.

A couple of times a week I go to the Olympic-size pool on campus to swim. There are a dozen outdoor basketball courts adjacent, and on class days, the students have pickup games. Even when I go swimming at night, there will be some guys still out on the courts in the dark, playing by the weak light seeping in from the street. The ball rings off the cement, the shadowy figures move around, the ball planks off the backboard. The game goes on even when the temperatures are in the 40s. I have never seen a girl on the courts or in a game on the many soccer fields.