Chinawatch

This is regular monthly series on what’s happening in China from a political, social, environmental, music and arts perspective. Email lucy@thepunch.com.au if you’d like to contribute or suggest a topic for discussion.

Life as an expat in China throws up several essential experiences: climbing the Great Wall, eating an unfamiliar animal, and having your internet censored by the local authorities. That being said, you really need to go out of your way to do the first two. The third is organised for you.

Basically every foreigner who leaves for China comes armed with some sort of firewall-bypassing gadget, and it seems that the Chinese Censorship Brigade are concerning themselves with the destruction of these services instead of blocking individual articles, videos or links.

A free service that several Australians were using to get around the Wall, for instance, mysteriously stopped working for all of us on the same afternoon several weeks ago, and has been offline here ever since.

Continue reading "ChinaWatch: Life behind the firewall of fear" »

This column is part of a monthly series on what’s happening in China from a political, social, environmental, music and arts perspective. If you’d like to contribute to the series, know of some great links, websites, magazines, contacts or just harbour a passion for China, feel free to drop me a line: lucy@thepunch.com.au.

Being an Australian of European background, I stand out instantly in China.

Such is the feeling of isolation in the crowd, though - the looks of intrigue, the whirlwind of Chinese characters and the confusion of rapid native conversations - to see another foreigner is almost always a source of comfort.

I’ve quickly found, in that moment, the attraction of the familiar inevitably draws out three questions in English.

Continue reading "ChinaWatch: When in Beijing… order in English" »

This column is the first of a monthly series we’ll be running on what’s happening in China from a political, social, environmental, music and arts perspective. If you’d like to contribute to the series, know of some great links, websites, magazines, contacts or just harbor a passion for China, feel free to drop me a line: lucy@thepunch.com.au.

Today in China there are approximately 123,509,752 children under 14 years of age. By the end of this year, 20 million others will be born.

Thanks to the one-child policy, 70 per cent of these children will go through life without a sibling. The average Chinese parent will spend up to two-fifths of their yearly income to educate them.

By 2040, this generation will form part of a minority: the workforce of a country that has grown old before reaching its full economic potential. Here’s how they’re growing up.

Continue reading "ChinaWatch: Growing up in a brewing social disaster" »