Noam Chomsky was in China recently, delivering a speech at Peking University and then conducting an interview with Southern Metropolis Daily. The folks at Global Voices Online have translated the questions (and re-translated the answers) - while he talks about the U.S. trying to force its views on China (yet anther example of American imperialism for him) and China's need to stop being the factory of the world, the author of Media Control is surprisingly silent on propaganda, only criticizing the West's use of advertising to influence elections. Or maybe he wasn't and it just wasn't published. Who knows! more ›

The Guardian went on a Zheng He kick yesterday, with not one but two articles relating to the famous eunuch general. First, a discussion of Zheng He's voyages and their relation to modern maritime attitudes - China has recently been citing his voyages as an "envoy of friendship and peace," and urged that countries consider anything modern China does to be in the same vein. By doing so, they may be - surprise - really reinterpreting history. Meanwhile, Chinese archeologistsare now in Kenya to search for the remains of a Zheng He-led armada that may have sunk there 600 years ago. more ›

What if the U.S. broke up (much like the Soviet Union did in the early 1990s)? According to one Russian professor, it means that Governer Ahnold may need to learn Chinese. more ›

Way back in 1925, during the heyday of foreign imperialism in Shanghai, discontent was fomenting among the local populace over what were generally considered to be unfair privileges granted to foreigners and Chinese exclusion from the governing Shanghai Municipal Council. The deals the foreign powers had struck up with Manchu officials in the 19th century, suspect from the beginning, had little official legitimacy after the fall of the Qing more than ten years earlier. Tensions reached a boiling point when labor protests at a Japanese factory resulted in an assault and the death of a Chinese employee on May 15th. more ›