Photos: Upgrading the Power Grid in Remote Tibet (August 7, 2017, The Atlantic)
In Tibet’s Hengduan Mountains, workers are hauling thousands of parts over challenging terrain by mule and by hand to build huge transmission towers for the Tibet Electric Power Networking Project. The complex power transmission project is designed to join and upgrade Tibet’s current disconnected and underpowered power transmission systems.

Sichuan Asks Its Elderly to Live With Their Children (August 8, 2017, Sixth Tone)
With a shortage of beds in nursing homes, the province has proposed a plan to make sure it can support its aging population.

The architect charged with bringing China's former capital back to life (August 9, 2017, CNN)
As rampant development unfolds across urban China, the country's former capital has retained much of its old charm. Many historic buildings still stand in Nanjing amid the steel and glass. And over 100 of them owe their longevity to Zhou.

China earthquake: Sichuan tremor leaves least 19 dead (August 9, 2017, BBC)
A 7.0-magnitude earthquake has killed at least 19 people and injured 247 in China's south-western province of Sichuan. Six tourists are thought to be among the dead, with up to 45,000 people evacuated from the area. A separate 6.6-magnitude tremor struck the remote area of XinJiang, injuring 32 people.

Drunk Chinese Spend Billions Getting Their Cars Home (August 9, 2017, Sixth Tone)
With ride-hailing apps already deeply entrenched in the lives of many urban Chinese, the country is now witnessing the growth of chauffeur services, which last year generated 15.4 billion yuan ($2.3 billion), according to a white paper published Tuesday.

Economics / Trade / Business

Photos: Sea Change: Chinese Fishing in Africa (August 7, 2017, China File)
The teeming waters off the coast of West Africa have been a key target in a government-subsidized and rapidly expanding foray into the industry known as “distant water fishing.” Chinese companies now captain a flotilla of nearly 3,000 industrial fishing vessels in international waters, the majority in the oceans off of Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea Bissau. 

China's crackdown on money fleeing the country looks like it's working (August 7, 2017, CNBC)
China's giant cash pile is increasing — and it's a sign that the government's industry-spanning crackdown on money fleeing the country is working. On Monday, official data showed that China's foreign exchange reserves in July hit $3.081 trillion, the highest in nine months.

McDonald's aims to open 2,000 more restaurants in China by 2022 (August 8, 2017, Chicago Tribune)
The plan to add 2,000 new restaurants to the country's existing 2,500 would make China the burger giant's second-largest market after the United States. Japan is currently McDonald's biggest market after the U.S., with almost 3,000 restaurants. McDonald's has 14,000 restaurants in the U.S. and 36,000 worldwide.

Arts / Entertainment / Media

Dwarves Kingdom: A Film Review (August 4, 2017, From the West Courtyard)
The World Ecological Garden of Butterflies and Little People Kingdom in Kunming, Yunnan, China is a theme park where over 100 dwarves live and work. Days are filled with putting on performances of song and dance, and interacting with park visitors, including posing for lots of photos. The first and natural response to this theme park, is that it must be exploitative and derogatory.

China's Few Investigative Journalists Face Increasing Challenges (August 6, 2017, NPR)
In recent years, though, Luo and other members of the influential "Hunan gang" of investigative journalists — which, in its heyday, brought down powerful political figures and exposed human rights abuses — have quit the business. To find out why, I recently met Luo at the Yuelu Academy, a 1,000-year-old school in Hunan's provincial capital, Changsha, which is near where he works.

Podcast: Cooking the News: Xi’s Digital Future (August 7, 2017, Little Red Podcast)
Louisa and Graeme are joined by David Bandurski and Qian Gang of the China Media Project to discuss innovations in news production and control in China. Also the question of Xi: he is no longer Xi Dada, but will President Xi be defined by a Theory, a Thought, or an Ism?

Flag-waving Chinese blockbuster Wolf Warriors 2 smashes cinema records (August 8, 2017, The Guardian)
The wildly popular Wolf Warriors 2 boasts the ominous tagline “whoever offends China will be hunted down no matter how far away they are”, and millions of Chinese cinemagoers have lapped it up since the movie’s release less than two weeks ago.

China’s Pretty Boys Find a New Gig: Propaganda Films (August 8, 2017, The New York Times)
But when it came time to find actors to play some of the Communist Party’s most venerated military commanders, the filmmakers behind “The Founding of an Army” made an unusual — some say disrespectful — casting decision: They piled on the “little fresh meat.” Known in Chinese as xiao xian rou, “little fresh meat” refers to Chinese teenage idols and boy band members, famous mostly for their manicured good looks and sculpted physiques.

History / Culture

Remembering Igor — our secret history (August 3, 2017, China Heritage)
This essay was written shortly after the death of Igor de Rackewiltz on 30 July 2016. It was initially circulated among friends and former colleagues. This is a revised version of that memoir and it should be read in tandem with Of Tartar Princesses, Poetry and Mongol Khans, also published by China Heritage.
 

Revealed: In 1939, China Planned to Settle Persecuted European Jews in Remote Part of Country (August 5, 2017, Haaretz)
Recently unearthed documents in Chinese state archives reveal a national plan to take in large numbers of European Jews, believing it was the right thing to do.

How the ‘Home of Overseas Chinese’ Is Memorializing Emigrants (August 7, 2017, Sixth Tone)
The Haikou Pier, built in 1853, ferried Taishanese to larger ports, including Hong Kong, from which they would continue their journeys abroad. By 1901, around 200,000 Taishanese people — then one-quarter of the city’s population — resided abroad, with 60 percent living in North America. 

Looking back on the Great Leap Forward (August 8, 2017, History Today)
Frank Dikötter explains how the gradual opening of Chinese archives has revealed the appalling truth about Chairman Mao’s genocidal rule.

Ancient Cat Facts (August 9, 2017, The World of Chinese)
From adoption rituals to the reason why cats aren’t in the Chinese zodiac, here’s how ancient Chinese received our feline overlords.

Travel / Food

Chinese tourists are everywhere, but why are foreign visitors shunning China? (August 5, 2017, South China Morning Post)
Visitors from China may have become the biggest contributors to the global tourism market, but the Asian giant with a 5,000-year history apparently is not that attractive to foreign travellers.

Chinese Tourists Seeking Out the Wild West Are Heading to Wyoming (August 5, 2017, Skift)
Buses carrying perhaps 50 tourists making one-night stopovers or lunch-time pauses make up the majority of Chinese tourists to Cody, but more families are flying to large regional cities such as Salt Lake City or Denver, renting cars and touring on their own.

“Big Plate Chicken” DaPanJi (大盘鸡): Xinjiang’s Best Food (August 6, 2017, Far West China)
Anybody who has ever spent any significant time in China’s far western region of Xinjiang knows that one of the best foods you can eat here is known as “DaPanJi” or “Big Plate Chicken”. What is 大盘鸡? Well, I’m glad you asked and I can’t wait to show you 🙂

China warns tourists to behave after two fined for Nazi salutes in Berlin (August 7, 2017, CNN)
The Chinese embassy in Berlin has warned its nationals to respect local laws after two Chinese tourists were detained for performing a Nazi salute in front of the city's parliament building. The tourists were arrested after posing for photos while making the Nazi gesture in front of the historic Reichstag building, a popular tourist destination, on Saturday.

The Titanic rises again: China makes history by remaking it (August 9, 2017, CBC)
In China's southern province of Sichuan, more than 1,000 kilometres from the nearest ocean, work is well underway on a near-exact replica of one of the biggest and most famous ships ever made. […]   The project is meant to attract up to 10 million tourists a year. But this isn't just an attraction — it will be a real ship, with a steel hull designed to support it, floating in a land-locked basin in Daying.

Language / Language Learning

Get to know your own Chinese voice (August 3, 2017, Hacking Chinese)
Recording yourself provides a convenient, enlightening and cheap way to improve your spoken Chinese, including pronunciation, which is hard to get at in any other way if you don’t hire a professional teacher to do it for you (but even then I would recommend listening more to your own voice).

What Does "Ju" Mean? (August 7, 2017, From the West Courtyard)
When I was living in China, newcomers, especially those who had been around for a few weeks or months and had started to pick up some new words and phrases, would often ask me, “what does ju (or some other word) mean?” The fact that Chinese is a character-based language means that this question is unhelpful, to the point of being almost meaningless.

Get Well Soon With These Over-the-Counter Chinese Medications (August 7, 2017, The Beijinger)
Instead, any regular old Beijing pharmacy, usually situated right around the corner at any given point, should house simple and cheap over-the-counter remedies to cure minor ailments that arise this time of year and, in turn, keep your summertime blues at bay. Below we've rounded up our top five favorites. We've also listed their names in Mandarin and approximate prices (which might vary depending on the pharmacy).

Books

Great Expectations (August 7, 2017, The World of Chinese)
John Pomfret’s highly anticipated new book, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China 1776 to the Present, opens with the voyage of the Empress and concludes as the effects of China’s 2015 stock-market stumble ripple through the New York Stock Exchange. It is a sweeping and ambitious book, one which, Pomfret has admitted in interviews, “cost me one very good job and two equally good job opportunities.”

Too Quickly to Be Astonished (August 9, 2017, From the West Courtyard)
Surveying China’s extraordinary rise over the past decade, Graham Allison, in his book Destined for War, paraphrases former Czech President Vaclav Havel when he says, “It has happened so quickly, we have not yet had time to be astonished.” Allison, a Harvard professor and security advisor to multiple US presidents, is referring primarily to China’s growing economic might, which, according to some statistics, put China over the top in 2014 as the world’s largest economy. 

Links for Researchers

Song Meiling (Soong Mayling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek), 1897 ~ 2003 (Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity)

From Chinese missiles to US warships, the South China Sea is heating up (August 7, 2017, China Policy Analysis)
Now the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), a US think tank, has warned that China was building new military facilities on the disputed Spratly archipelago, off the coast of Phillipines, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Image credit: by Ninara, via Flickr