Results tagged “confucius”

Well, at least no one can say that he isn't versatile. After years of playing bad-ass gangsters and Kung Fu masters, Chow Yun-Fat has most recently popped up in Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and the soon-to-be-released, anime-turned-movie Dragonball Evolution. Soon, however, he'll have all eyes on him in a movie chronicling the life and times of Confucius.

• Karmapa softens stance on China [BBC] "The Karmapa Lama - Tibetan Buddhism's third-highest figure - has spoken of his admiration for Chinese culture. The comment made in an interview with the BBC Chinese Service suggested a willingness to co-operate with China. He said he backed the Dalai Lama's policy of seeking greater autonomy for Tibetans rather than independence, but blamed Beijing for deadlocked talks."
• ExxonMobil to build tech center in Shanghai [Forbes] "ExxonMobil Chemical Co., one of the world's biggest petrochemical companies, said Tuesday it plans to build a technology center in Shanghai to support its business in the region. The project will involve an initial investment of $70 million and the center will be opened in 2010, said the company."
• China, Taiwan grow closer with new surge in tourism [Reuters] "Taiwan has seen a sudden spike in tourism from China, as an effort by Beijing to improve ties helps its political rival battle recession with a long-sought boost to the service sector."

Photo from 2 dogs

A BBC report (proxy needed) talks about the Confucian schools that are now thriving across China. And why are parents sending their kids to such schools?:

"Traditional culture has many advantages that cannot be learned by modern education," says Yu Fang, the mother of a three-year-old pupil. "It emphasises virtues like kindness and self-discipline. It is very good for my son and very good for Chinese society as well." Another mother, Wang Ching, agrees: "This is a material world, people want a higher standard of living and they are focused on material things, not spiritual ones." Modern China, with its headlong rush for growth, needs more balance and more of the social order and courtesy extolled by Confucius, she says. Confucianism and Communism have never been happy bedfellows... [read more]

PLUS LEE KUAN YEW AND HIS ROLE IN SINO-SINGAPORE RELATIONS The last week has seen top leaders zipping between China and Singapore to cement ties and sign new deals. Let's take you through the high-profile visits one by one before diving deeper into more detail (Warning: Long article!): Goh Chok Tong visits new Shanghai party chief and the Singapore-Suzhou Industrial Park Last week, Singapore's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong swung by Shanghai to visit her...

One of our favorite Chinese sites seems to have run afoul of the net nanny: vip.bokee.com has been on again off again, but perfectly viewable with a proxy. Using the proxy we saw an article about a list published in a Chengdu newspaper of the top-grossing authors in China, at least based on royalties from the sales of their books. At the top of the list was a Guo Jingming, a young author (born in...

Via China Net Investor, this interview of the founders of Shanghai-based dot.com Tudou.com, Gary Wang and Marc van der Chijs, serves up one very juicy tidbit of information — that Tudou.com is already streaming more minutes of video content every month than YouTube (15 billion minutes per month versus 3.5 billion)! Then in a self-deprecatory turn, Wang turns around to say that those numbers are never really accurate.

Ooooh yeahhh, crab lovers rejoice for it is that time of the year again when Suzhou's Yangcheng Lake (阳澄湖) hairy crabs go on sale! Thank God the algae that bloomed in Lake Tai in Wuxi and Dianchi Lake in Kunming decided to spare the Yangcheng Lake so we can still have crab this year.

People who have made the news this week

You might have recently have heard of Yu Dan (于丹), a professor at Beijing Normal University (北师大), who has recently become the it girl when it comes to popularizing ancient Chinese philosophers. Her books on Confucius' Analects and more recently, the Zhuangzi, offer a breezy exposition and bite-sized nuggets of ancient wisdom for China's spiritually beleaguered moderns and have catapulted Yu Dan into a writer-intellectual cum best-selling cultural critic category unto herself.

Celebrated American writer and critic Gore Vidal was interviewed by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr on Sunday at Glamour Bar before a full audience as the opening speaker for the 2007 Shanghai International Literary Festival. Over his career which spans more than 60 years, Vidal has produced novels, plays, screenplays, and numerous essays and pamphlets, and most recently, he published his memoirs, Point-to-Point Navigation.

DNA technology has lead many to ponder what could actually be in the world. For some of us, our links with DNA technology stays closer to a key tool in the endless variations of CSI and as a means to revive lost species in Jurassic Park.

Beijing is holding a human rights exhibition, the first of its kind, from November 17-26. The exhibit features all kinds of human rights related materials, such as documents, white papers, multimedia and interactive stations, as well as sculptures and other artistic works.

Even as the ladies rush to be registered as descendants of Confucius, and as churches -- both state-sanctioned and underground -- continue to swell and burst through the seams all across the land, China is becoming the most unlikely birthplace of progressive Islam, if this highly enlightening Asia Times article entitled "Islam with Chinese Characteristics" is anything to go by.

• Officials in Beijing deny ing rumors that 1 million migrants would be expelled from the capital during the Olympics. However, as we mentioned earlier, 50 of the 239 schools for migrant workers have been closed down recently -- in some cases by the police, en masse. On the brighter side, those that get to remain in Beijing will have a spiffy new light-rail system by 2008 to whisk them around from place to place!
• The 8th Yunnan province Minority Games has been kinda of a mess: male athletes using wigs to dress up as women, people fighting, and athletes that only speak with donbei (northeastern) accents.
• After a recent BBC undercover investigation into illegal organ transplants in a Tianjin hospital, Chinese officials replied by sayingthere was no such thing happening.

Our favourite news agency reports that for the first time, women are to be recognised as descendants of Confucius in a new family tree of the ancient Chinese philosopher. This fifth update of the family tree, according to Reuters, will add more than 1 million "registered" descendants of Confucius.

Americans, and the American northwest in particular, have caught the China fever -- for why else would they decide to construct a Chinese pavilion in Des Moines, Iowa? OK, we don't really consider that a big deal, but then again we've spent some time in places like Richmond, BC (OK, let's include Canada) and Rowland Heights, California -- Chinese enclaves where you could go days without hearing English -- so perhaps we shouldn't take the pavilion for granted.

We reported earlier on an elementary school in the Songjiang District whose focus was having its 12 pupils memorize Chinese classics such as the Analects (Lun Yu) and the Book of Changes (Yi Jing). Well, that school has been closed down by the authorities, who claim that this school contravenes the “compulsory education (yiwu jiaoyu)” laws. The Shanghai Daily reports that the school will be punished for charging high tuition fees (30,000 yuan a year), not having a government license, and because children are required to get nine years of compulsory education.

In this week's edition of "Shanghaiist Trashes the Media" we have an article from the Sydney Morning Herald. Here's the premise:

Shanghaiist is pretty sure that this has something to do with the Da Vinci Code fever that swept the world in the last few years. While not many Chinese will lay claim to being descendants of the Son of God (making them descendants of God as well!), there are quite a number that could possibly be descendants of another thinker. One was the son of a virgin and the other was born out of wedlock, but you can never judge a man by his origins. Confucius did all right by himself, as we reported earlier. But some of you, especially those surnamed Kong, are not going to be satisfied until you know that you are definitely descendants of Confucius. Well, 1,000 RMB is all that is standing between you and an answer. You can take a DNA test and find out:

Some have been heard to lament China's love of traditional aspects of society, citing many traditions as being hinderances to real social development and progression. Those people who do feel so may be dismayed, though not surprised, at the recent news that filial piety is still given such importance in 2006:

Other posters:

Shanghaiist recently caught wind of an article in the magazine Fast Company called "The Gucci-Killers", which we at first thought referred to some obscure antiglobalization terrorist group but was actually an article about the up-and-coming luxury fashion and lifestyle brand Shanghai Tang. We have to say that this article rubbed us the wrong way because of the damn near breathless way in which it describes Shanghai and China. For example, take this first paragraph:

Shanghaiist received the same email press release about the new book Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer that Danwei and China Herald did. The book is written by Tom Doctoroff, Greater China CEO of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. And the press release includes a list -- “Twelve Facts About the Confucian Consumer” -- that was "compiled by JWT to coincide with" the release of the book. Are all Chinese consumers Confucian consumers (whatever that means)? Are all Chinese consumers the same? Of course not. But they, obviously, are different than your average Western consumer, and we believe Doctoroff is trying to explain to his (mostly Western) audience just how they are different. We are publishing JWT's list below. As Danwei said, some of the items "ring true." Others can, and should be, contested. We'd love to hear what you have to say about this list, especially our Chinese readers:

Xinhua reported that the first official commemoration of the birth of Confucius occurred on Tuesday in Confucius' home town of Qufu in Shangdong Province (山东曲阜) since 1948. More than three thousand people showed up to pay homage to the great thinker. In fact, there were celebrations and ceremonies across China and the world, including in places like Zhejiang Province's Quzhou (浙江衢州) where in 2004 the first "Confucius Day" festival was held. Kids recited verses from Confucius' most well-known work, The Analects (论语). We're sure it must have been a stirring and patriotic scene.

Nestled under plane trees and a thatched roof on Fenyang Lu near the Shanghai Conservatory of Music is a shop unlike any other in the city. Most passersby mistake it for a teahouse, but free tea is only the beginning of what one can savor in its timeless confines. For this place is Shanghai's first and only shop devoted specifically to the appreciation and study of the world's oldest written musical tradition, an instrument known to moderns as the guqin（古琴）, or "ancient stringed instrument."