Here’s some speculation you won’t see much in mainstream media. I don’t have enough time to expand at the moment, but the title says it all. A conservative writer ponders whether current day economic success by the Chinese is due to a socially Darwinist society.

So true. I recently did just this within earshot of a friend of the salesperson who happened to be Asian. She didn’t react at all, and so I assumed that she wasn’t Chinese and continued. It was an incorrect assumption. Woops.
(First seen here)

thought this post was interesting. the chinese, it seems, are forgetting how to write. the poster cites his experience in china mentioning that many educated elite can’t remember how to write relatively simple lexical chunks like “sneeze” or 噴嚏, or even “goodbye” 再見. what they do is what i noticed flare doing (although he has the excuse of not being raised there): referring to their cellphone.

according to the latimes, dysgraphia, or forgetting how to write, is most common among the young tech heavy crowd. why attempt to remember how the complex stroke pattern goes when you can just look it up on your phone?

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Q4U (2002), Feng Mengbo

Feng Mengbo (b. 1966) is a contemporary Chinese artist known for his melding of video game culture with imagery from the Cultural Revolution. As you can probably guess, he is an obsessive online gamer.

more artwork after the jump.

• Artwork: Fang Lijun, No. 1

• Artist: Fang Lijun, 方力钧

• DOB: December 4, 1963

• Beijing-based

• Member of Cynical Realism Movement (1990s)

documentary on I.M. Pei’s return to his hometown and the art museum that he constructed there.

he talks a little about his iconic works like the louvre pyramid and the bank of china tower. what struck me was partly how little this museum pushed the boundaries considering his previous works. i wonder if he cared more about local opinion on this b/c it was his hometown.

i also learned where chinese find the beautiful and strange rocks that are displayed in gardens around important old buildings and the ancestral homes of rich families. there’s an actual profession of stone farming where the farmer finds promising rocks, sculpts the rocks by cutting holes in some areas, and submerges them in a river. his son will remove the rocks after the river sculpts them 20 years later and sells them. that’s so beautiful… and so chinese.

(source)