‘Chinese Language Week’ has rolled around again, and if you look on Twitter, there are plenty of Chinese New Zealanders (myself included) and our allies miffed about this. And we get the usual trolls come by. First up, it’s not Chinese Language Week. It’s Mandarin Language Week. I have no problem with the promotion of […]
Read More… from The reality of Chinese Language Week for many Chinese New Zealanders
Steve Cadman/Creative Commons 2·0 I don’t profess to be an expert on how Hong Kong law functions these days with its mix of old British ordinances and the laws made after 1997, but one thing that struck me with at least the news reports covering the criminalizing of insults against ‘March of the Volunteers’, the […]
Read More… from Where does Hong Kong’s new national anthem law leave parody?
Equal access: an audio recording of this blog post can be found here. I know I’m not alone among expats watching the Occupy Central movements in Hong Kong. More than the handover in 1997, it’s been making very compelling live television, because this isn’t about politicians and royalty, but about everyday Hong Kong people. […]
Read More… from An expatriate’s view of Occupy Central and what Hong Kong wants
I was asked by my Alma Mater, Victoria University of Wellington, to give a 90-minute lecture on leadership last week to students visiting New Zealand from Peking University and the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. (My half-serious suggestion that I spoke Cantonese and the three students from Guangdong who understood could translate to Mandarin to […]
Next year marks the centenary of the founding of the Chinese republic. We got rid of our rather hopeless Ching Dynasty, and ushered in Asia’s first democracy. Both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China see 1911 as an important year, and Dr Sun Yat-sen as the founder of the nation […]
Read More… from How could the Chinese republic celebrate its centenary?