Ping Jiang street, Suzhou, China, by cattan2011 (CC BY 2.0 ..read more

Nymphia Wind, a Taiwanese drag queen, has won the 16th season of the American reality TV competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race. Her victory has been cause for quiet celebration in China, where drag is in the ascendant despite increased state repression of the LGBTQ+ community. Nymphia Wind is the drag persona of Leo Tsao, a 28-year-old Taiwanese American fashion designer. Wind’s outspoken pride in both her Asian and Taiwanese heritage has made her a complex figure in China. At The Washington Post, Vic Chiang interviewed Nymphia Wind and wrote that Chinese netizens are keeping quiet on her victor ..read more

In Peter Hessler’s latest piece for The New Yorker, “How Chinese Students Experience America,” he notes that “COVID, guns, anti-Asian violence, and diplomatic relations have complicated the ambitions of the some three hundred thousand college students who come to the U.S. each year.” One of the first places that some of these hurdles manifest is at the American border, where a growing number of Chinese students and researchers have recently found themselves unexpectedly barred entry to the U.S. on the basis of broad national security concerns. Experts argue that the political inertia behind th ..read more

Untitled (Fengjian village, Guangdong province), by Peter Chou Kee Liu (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ..read more

On April 14, Sina News Hot Topics published a lengthy article on Weibo under the clickbait headline “The First Batch of DINKs, Exposed: Where Are They Now, and Do They All Regret Not Having Kids?” The four-part article focused on ostensible profiles of DINK (“double income, no kids”) couples, most of whom were portrayed as either lonely, estranged, divorced, bitter, or regretful that they had never had children. Some of those profiled said that they had changed their minds and decided to have kids after all. Although the article purported to present both sides of the issue, both the language a ..read more

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a long way home, by Ee Shawn (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ..read more

After a decades-long infrastructure spending spree, many of China’s local governments now find themselves saddled with unsustainable levels of debt and a surplus of vastly ambitious but often underutilized infrastructure projects. The International Monetary Fund and Wall Street banks estimate China’s total outstanding off-balance-sheet government debt to hover between $7 trillion to $11 trillion U.S. dollars, which includes bonds issued by thousands of local-government financing vehicles (LGFVs) to finance roads, bridges, and other forms of infrastructure.  The local government debt probl ..read more

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