Fact-Checking a Chinese Hero: Evan Osnos on the diary of Lei Feng, “the yeti of Chinese Communist history”: http://nyr.kr/YNXxFE

Above: A portrait of Lei Feng. Photograph by Evan Osnos. 

On a research trip last week, I spent several days wandering the warrens of Hardware City, the self-described “largest hardware market in China”—a maze of stores so large and uniformly dedicated to selling heavy metal objects that calling it a market doesn’t begin to describe it. It is an awesomely vast and odd place—a hundred acres encompassing two thousand workshops and storefronts and thirty thousand souls…

Evan Osnos visits Hardware City, China’s largest hardware market: http://nyr.kr/13bzKao 

Photographs by Evan Osnos.

A decade after recognizing that the middle class might be a signpost on the way to redemption, the government is demonstrably failing to enact the will of the men and women it needs most, and thus it risks losing its greatest bulwark against the change it fears.

In today’s Daily Comment, Evan Osnos writes about the Chinese government’s failure to cultivate and satisfy the middle class: http://nyr.kr/YR7AIO

Photograph by Feng Li/Getty.

Notes on (another) suppressed Chinese scandal: http://nyr.kr/XGI0sR

Photograph: ChinaFotoPress/Getty.

SHANGHAI (The Borowitz Report)—In a rare announcement from a notoriously publicity-shy group, Chinese hackers revealed today that they were dropping the United States government from their official list of high-value targets. Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/XIBBvc

In November, 2011, a group of American creative giants—Meryl Streep, Yo-Yo Ma, and others—traveled to Beijing for a high-culture take on ping-pong diplomacy. TheU.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culturewas the work of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, headed by Orville Schell, and it produced a four-day mash-up intended to give each side more exposure to the other, beyond the contentious debates over economic and politics. The filmmakers Joel Coen and Lu Chuan talked movies; the chef Alice Waters and the author Michael Pollan discussed organic cuisine with Chinese food activists. It culminated in a performance of music, poetry, and dance at “The Egg,” China’s national opera house, arranged by Yo-Yo Ma and Damien Woetzel, the former principle dancer from the New York City Ballet.

Among the visitors, only one was making his first trip outside the United States—or, for that matter, was the first member of his family to do so. Charles (Lil Buck) Riley is “the Baryshnikov of jookin,” as he was once described in theTimes. He is the most famous practitioner of the Memphis style of hip-hop footwork. When Lil Buck’s earlier collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma was posted to YouTube, it drew more than two million views.

His four days of dancing across Beijing—and on the Great Wall of China—have been distilled into a short film by Ole Schell (son of Orville), who discovered that traveling around Beijing in Lil Buck’s orbit was like “experiencing the culture again for the first time.” Older Chinese viewers were baffled, but “you go into any Beijing or Shanghai club and they will be blasting the latest from rap songs from the United States”—without ever having seen it up-close.

The film, here, will remind you of the thrill of seeing China for the first time. I posed some questions to Lil Buck, at the link below.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Hollywood and China could have a profitable new future together, but American directors might be surprised by the way Chinese fans can react to some good-natured pushback against the censors…

Evan Osnos on the growing relationship between Hollywood and China: http://nyr.kr/WWZHFR

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)