Reading Recommendations

A couple issues have been generating a great deal of media interest lately: continued coverage of the situation in Tibet, and the political views (and demonstrations) of Chinese students. Here are a few recommendations for further reading on those two topics:

1. We referenced this piece in an earlier posting, but just in case you didn’t make the jump that time, we wanted to urge you to do it again. China Digital Times has this fascinating translation of a Qinghua student’s description of what happened when several Public Security Bureau officers dropped by his group’s Carrefour protest planning meeting.

2. James Fallows blogged recently on a Beijing exhibit on Tibetan history as a window onto how Chinese are thinking about Tibet’s historical relationship to China.

3. For a look at how one group of students (members of Guizhou University’s Kurt Vonnegut book club) are struggling with their visions of China’s future, see Mike Levy’s piece at In These Times.

4. For a great summary of the events in Tibet, see Robert Barnett’s review of Pico Iyer’s new book in the New York Review of Books.

5. There are interesting quotes about the protests from Chinese students gathered by Monroe Price at HuffPost (and he links to Jeff Wasserstrom’s recent piece at The Nation’s blog near the end).

6. And finally, this commentary by Kerry Brown at opendemocracy makes the tongue-in-cheek argument that China’s recent bad news, from Tibet to the torch relay, will have the effect of lowering expectations for the Olympics—a correction Brown argues was much-needed.