Women Of The Country

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These too will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China is always changing. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is...

10/22/2011

Gallery of Women Activists

There have been radical changes for women in China in just a century. Here we profile some extraordinary women working to improve human rights, the environment and AIDS education. You may also nominate your own candidates to be added to our gallery.

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Oct 22, 2011 11:15:17 PM | Activist/Dissident, Women

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The following is a synopsis of the impact of international agreements on the legal status of Taiwan: 1. Article 2 of the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) ceded Formosa, her dependencies, and the Pescadores from China to Japan in "perpetuity and full sovereignty." Japan's sovereignty over the islands would not be disputed by China or any other state for the next 50 years. 2. In paragraph 3 of the Cairo Declaration (1943), the United States, Great Britain, and China declared that "it is their purpose that Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized...

Shifting Nature "I've had anonymous, threatening phone calls, saying, 'This isn't any of your business, so keep out of it. Don't stick your nose into matters that don't concern you.' That's one thing. But it's not all. I have been beaten up." -- Huo Daishan, environmental campaigner China is trying to feed 20 percent of the world's population on 7 percent of the world's arable land. A third of the world uses water from China's rivers. But rapid industrialization and climate change have led to bad air, polluted rivers and drought. Environmental activists, Party officials, academics and scientists are in a daily...

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10/22/2011

Women Of The Country

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