For starters, there was already a movie called The Karate Kid that everyone loves. It’s the tale of Jersey boy Daniel LaRusso who moves to Reseda and learns how to defend himself against the town dicks from his Japanese handyman. Other than the fact that Japanese handymen are hard to come by these […]

I missed China’s big 6-0 here on Flumesday, but there were a couple things of note I thought I’d throw up on here, for the benefit of my readers (basically my Uncle Michael at this point). The first is a link to something really brilliant written at the Huffington Post by my favorite writer. […]

Big news out of China this weekend: the government is now encouraging couples in Shanghai to have two kids, a reversal of the country’s famous “one-child policy” — the federal mandate instituted in 1979 to control China’s raging population. But with this week’s announcement by China’s Family Planning Commission, something else will be raging: […]

For those who may not have seen The Tank Man, I’m posting here as an essential part of Flumesday’s effort to provide the most interesting stories on Tiananmen leading up to the 20th anniversary. The Frontline doc isn’t anything new — it aired in April, 2006 on PBS. But it is, 20 years later, the […]

A new book, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, to be released Tuesday, documents the dissent from China’s former leader over the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989. Zhao Ziyang, China’s leader from 1987 until a month before the massacre, recorded 30 hours of audio before his 2005 death claiming, among […]

As June 4th draws nearer, many will be looking back twenty years and observing China’s most shameful memory — the government massacre in Tiananmen Square that left hundreds dead. But what many forget, including myself until recently, is that just a week after that bloody Sunday in Beijing, a 17 year-old kid in Paris made […]

With a month to go before the 20-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre or crackdown or whatever you choose to call it, news publications are already beginning to run pieces on the 20 years since the massacre, and what has become of all those bright-eyed students and youths who chose to stand up to […]

A strange, strange story in the New York Times today looks at the grass-mud horse craze in China, an effort by a fed-up Chinese citizenry to mock Beijing’s web censorship. Though my understanding of this is somewhere between mediocre and sound, what I can gather is that the grass-mud horse, an alpaca-like animal, sounds exactly […]

In a breaking story Monday morning, the Chinese navy has pulled a high school-style prank on a U.S. vessel in the South China sea. Reportedly, a Chinese intelligence ship and four other vessels surrounded the USNS Impeccable, came dangerously close to the ship and then Chinese crew members sprayed the U.S. vessel with fire […]

The World Baseball Classic rolls on today without the Small Red Machine, the Chinese national team, eliminated Sunday by Beijing Olympic champs South Korea. The Seoul Men slapped around China in a 14-0 rout that had to be called after the top of the seventh inning in accordance with the WBC’s “mercy rule.” As […]