Over at Asia Society, former Shanghaiist editor Dan Washburn has an excellent interview with Mike Chinoy, who served as CNN's Beijing bureau chief from 1987 to 1995 and is currently a Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. In the interview, Chinoy looks back at the challenges that he and other China correspondents faced in getting their work done, and how that contrasts with the situation today. more ›

When you think of major cultural figures of 1980s New York, names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Run-D.M.C. and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all come to mind. Though Ai Weiwei might now rank as a towering contemporary art sage, he could hardly be considered to have been in the same league during the cultural moment when New York was a cheaper and more authentically shitty place to live. The new show at the Asia Society Museum in Manhattan, Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993, is Ai's personal record of his twenty-something nascence, fleshing out his pre-famous years of gestation for the now-interested New York audience. more ›

China news hounds had already probably grasped this discrepancy already, but nothing drives home the point like a graphic! There are over 300 million Chinese people currently learning English, compared to the tiny lil' 60,000 Americans learning Chinese. Maybe it's time to up those numbers - after all, lest you be like the only kid in third grade who didn't learn pig latin, and thus the only kid every other kid was making fun of openly, you upid-stay ingbat-day. more ›

Journalist, author and Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, Orville Schell, urges the United States to learn how to deal with a more confident and assertive China. Read the full transcript here. more ›

In his acceptance speech for the Roy M. Huffington Award for Contributions to International Understanding at an Asia Society ball last Thursday in Houston, Texas, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker had some words to say to the Americans who saw China's rise as a threat: "Allow me to be blunt. Some in the United States — not a majority by any means, but certainly a vocal minority — see China's rise as a threat somehow to America's international status. They believe that conflict between our two countries is inevitable as Chinese ambitions clash with American position and power. Ladies and gentlemen, these observers are wrong. And they are not only wrong, they are dangerously wrong. And the reason is very simple — their analyses grossly underestimate the broad areas where Chinese and American interests converge." Hear that, Sarah Palin? Hear that? more ›

Here's a site that's definitely worth adding to your bookmarks - especially if you're a sinophile: The China Boom Project. The brainchild of the Asia Society's Center on US-China Relations, it's an impressive multimedia site dedicated to answering one "deceptively simple" question: Why did China boom? more ›

China Green has released another great look at some of the environmental problems plaguing this country. This time around, we head to the Tibetan plateau's Anyemaqen mountain range and the effects of climate change there. As explained on their website: more ›

With all the recent talk about pollution and children being poisoned, we thought it'd be good to take a quick look at a documentary from 1992 about Da Zhu Xian, a remote county in Sichuan Province. more ›

Climate Change: China in Action, produced by the China Meteorological Administration and featured on the always excellent China Green is a short film that documents efforts by the Chinese government, as well as NGOs, scientists and corporations to address climate change: more ›

Guanzhou sits to the southeast of the Guangzhou economic machine. It’s a place that was simply leapfrogged by development. Further south, beyond University City, is Panyu, a suburban area now boasting Asia’s largest water park. To the north and west is the dense urban network of buildings and streets of a massive city on the make. Once you zoom out a bit, the wresting of land from villagers not too far from some of the most expensive land in China seems not only inevitable but long overdue. more ›