Friday Song: Taiwanese drummer S.white kills rendition of ‘Stranger in the North’
Stranger in the North — which has been viewed 102 million times on YouTube — is a collaboration…
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Friday Song: Happy New Year!
Okay, we’re cheating a little — this song is actually for wishing people a happy Chinese new year. But if…
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Friday Song: ‘The Sea, My Hometown’ — a song of home, a song of loss
From its very debut in 1982, “The Sea, My Hometown” (大海啊故乡) felt like a lament, spun with the last…
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Friday Song: Bohan Phoenix is the rapper we need
妈妈说你是不是不要脸 身上都是纹身所有人都看得见 我说妈妈等你儿子赚了钱 看你在不在乎这么一点点 — Bohan Phoenix, from “Product” (一模一样 yīmúyīyàng) Bohan Phoenix is a product of his environment, as…
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Tango Gao finds art and humor in the mundane
I meet the comic illustrator known as Tango — real name Gao Youjun 高幼军 — in a studio in…
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Friday Song: 游击队之歌, a ‘red song’ that champions bipartisanship
When I was nine, my father went to China, returning to the country of his birth for the first…
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Friday Song: BEJ48, the spin-off girl idol super band
Most nights at a theater inside the Chaoyang U-Town Shopping Center in Beijing, a group of young women will…
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Friday Song: Bang your head with Overload
At the dawn of the 1990s, a record producer from Taipei named Landy Chang — Zhang Peiren 张培仁 —…
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Miss Universe, China
This story first appeared in Danwei on August 28, 2011, and is republished here, with slight edits, with permission….
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Friday Song: 歌声与微笑 — when a children’s song could unite a country
Welcome to Friday Song, a new feature in which we spotlight a different Chinese song every week across…
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The great romantic of 20th-century Chinese poetry, Xu Zhimo
This past spring, I traveled to rural Zhejiang Province to participate in a poetry event. At one of the…
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Historian gripes about access and quality of archives in China
Shen Zhihua 沈志华 is a famous Chinese historian who specializes in the history of the Soviet Union,…
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When words kill: ‘Big-character posters’ are testament to tenacity and suffering in one of China’s darkest periods
In China in Ten Words, translated into English by Allan H. Barr, author Yu Hua gives a trenchant description…
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‘The Taste of Rice Flower’ and other notable Chinese movies from the Pingyao International Film Festival
Starting from the opening ceremony of the Pingyao International Film Festival (PYIFF) two weeks ago and through to…
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The fate of music festivals in China’s current era of cultural nationalism
Ten years ago, the first large outdoor music festivals in China were built with jerry-rigged stages and borrowed sound…
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