🇬🇧 Oral History of China Studies in Scandinavia

I am delighted, honoured and proud to have been included in Helsinki University's Oral History of China Studies in Scandinavia, portraying China scholars in Scandinavia.

The interview was conducted by Dusica Ristivojevic - via zoom in times of covid lock down.

Read the interview here

Further reading in...

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🇬🇧 Showdown with China’s Birth Control

Familiepolitik i Kina

CHINA // ANALYSIS - Decades of strict birth control in China is being eased. Too many elderly and too few younger people to support them means that after four decades of the contrary, young Chinese will soon be encouraged to have children - perhaps even out of wedlock, which has so far been both forbidden and punishable.

I have looked at what China's 14th Five-Year Plan means for the birth rate...

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🇬🇧 Beijing Revisited

Here you can read excerpts from my Beijing Diary from 1989, which was published again 25 years later with the original diary along with my analysis of what had happened in the meantime, and what the activists of 1989 actually achieved with their massive challenge to the Communist Party of China.

Steve Schein did a wonderful job with the translation. However, the book hasn't been published in English. More...

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🇬🇧 As Long as We Survive

Read Chinese poet Fang Fang's moving account from her coronavirus-struck hometown Wuhan. Translated and re-posted by China Digital Times - and now by me:

We’re all still stuck at home on lockdown, yet some people are already singing praise to the government and posting book covers about the victory that has been achieved (if they’re not trolling). What do the people of Wuhan...

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🇬🇧 Art in China – an Effervescent Battleground

April 8, 2016

My essay from Museum of Modern Art in Århus, Denmark, ARoS' catalogue for the magnificent exhibition A New Dynasty - Created in China, Nov 2015-June 2016

Faces without contours spewing out donkey heads, their stodgy lives literally making them puke. Portable,...

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🇬🇧 Back when Camels were Welcome in Beijing

A silent, dust-covered Beijing greeted us – four exchange students from Denmark – as the train softly came to a stop at Beijing’s Central Railway Station one mild Indian summer day in September 1981 after an eight-day train journey with the Trans-Siberian railway from Copenhagen Central Station.

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Incidental New Yorker X

November 8,
2015

Funside

🍌 Halloween is a
major event here; as well as big business ensnaring children and adults alike.
I met a guy, all dressed up, and really couldn't figure out what he was trying
to impersonate. It turned out to be a banana, but the costume was so
uncomfortable that he wasn't wearing the upper part. It was good that...

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Incidental New Yorker IX

October 27,
2015

Chinaside

⭐️ Ai Weiwei has done it again! This man is a true virtuoso at playing the international media. He brilliantly unmasks authorities and hypocrisy by placing a virtual mirror right in their faces and deeds. This time Lego is in the eye of the storm, even a virtual toilet storm, as Ai has posted a picture of Lego...

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🇬🇧 China’s Bully-Diplomacy

When foreign leaders bow to China’s irate demands that they do not meet with the Dalai Lama it is by no means out of respect. It is because China transforms into a thug, totally resistant to reason.

By Mette Holm, 8 February, 2015

Recently,
Tibet’s exiled religious leader the Dalai Lama attended President Obama’s
National Prayer Breakfast in...

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