A hundred days. That’s how long it took Xiao Meili to walk from Beijing, in the arid north, to the humid, central city of Changsha. Since September, the 24-year-old has been trekking south and west across the Chinese heartland, along rumbling highways, around construction sites, down dusty streets. She stops along the way to send letters to local officials. Her plea: China must change the way it handles sex abuse.
On March 9, 2018, China's largest feminist platform "Voice of Women's Rights"'s Weibo account and WeChat official account were permanently suspended. Before being blocked, its Weibo account had 180,000 fans and the Wechat account had 70,000 fans. In order to retrieve the account, the staff of "Voice of Women's Rights" conducted a long-term struggle to defend their rights.
A high school student from The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China Made a Movie about "Sexual Minorities", a Topic Avoided By Almost Every Parent. How Should We Start Talking About This?" was widely circulated among people on Wechat. The topic "High School Students Made a Trans Movie" went viral and ranked highly on Weibo’s most searched topics.
Leilei Zhang was harassed on a public bus when a man gripped her hand, glared at her and refused to let go. With the determination to raise public awareness, Leilei began a crowd-funding campaign to raise money for what could have been China's first public anti-sexual harassment advertisement. She approached the authorities of her home city, Guangzhou, but it did not want to take on the advertising for fear it would panic the public.
Ladies’ Room, lasting fewer than six and a half minutes, offers a behind-the-scenes look at a women’s washroom in a nightclub located in a Beijing hotel. A male patron of Cui Xiuwen’s studio first took her there, and she acknowledges being drawn to the ladies’ room precisely because her host did not have access to it.
Zheng Xi 郑熹, a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on gender studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Zheng has launched a campaign asking city governments around China to display anti-sexual-harassment logos, complete with a groper’s “salty-pig hand” visual (etymological context here), alongside other commonly displayed public safety logos on places like subway trains and buses.
On April 26th, 2012, Zheng Churan, a feminist activist who was a senior at Zhongshan University at the time, brought 500 letters of advocacy to the school post office on a bicycle.
She seeks to utilize her feminist art to spread awareness on mental health issues. Sravy is a nomad in her own right, and throughout her experiences in Asia she has noticed that there are stimas surrounding women's autonomy and how they handle mental health struggles.
Whose Utopia? was made by the Chinese artist Cao Fei and filmed at the OSRAM lighting factory in Foshan in the Pearl River Delta in southern China during 2005 and 2006. It was commissioned as part of a project entitled ‘What Are They Doing Here?’ that was run by the Siemens Art Program from 2000 to 2006 and involved Chinese artists undertaking six-month-long residencies at industrial facilities across the country.
The rise of rock and roll in the late 1980 was largely associated with the student movements taking place at the same time. Cui Jian, considered by many to be the godfather of Chinese rock, even performed for the students on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
In 2011, nine local artists staged a performance called “Let’s Add 1 Meter to Taipa Pequena (Sio Tam Hill)” in Macau, protesting against the controversial attempted rezoning of the mountain for high-rise construction by the developers. They lied on top of each other with their naked bodies, forming a one-meter-high pile of human nudity on the Taipa Pequena.
In 2009, the dissident artist created a work to honour the thousands of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. He recalls how the project, Remembering, angered China’s rulers – and changed his career for ever
This is an edited extract from The Start podcast
“A Foreigner Makes Beijing’s Smog into Rings” has become a tittle used by a multitude of popular public accounts on Wechat, the most commonly used chatting app in China, which makes more and more Chinese netizens know the story of Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch artist and “social designer”, who has been making effort to combine the energy saving technology with visually enjoyable art.
Food delivery riders are taking industrial action in China over low pay and the recent detention of an unofficial labor leader. The strike comes after Xiong Yan, who headed an unofficial union formed by workers for the food delivery app Ele.me and other services, was detained in Beijing last month. His whereabouts are still unknown.
North Korea Releases Country’s First-Ever Video Game
North Korea has just released the country’s first-ever video game titled 'Pyongyang Racer'.
The racing game was created by a developer known only as Nosotek, and was commissioned by Koryo, a British tour company that takes travelers to North Korea.
A group of activists took to the trains to protest the horrendous treatment that the Singapore government meted out upon 22 individuals who were detained 30 years ago under an operation that was entitled,"Operation Spectrum" with the use of the Internal Security Act (ISA).
Pneumoconiosis has become the most serious occupational disease in China, and the vast majority of sufferers, nearly 6 million, are migrant workers. Because of the long-term inhalation of dust caused by pulmonary fibrosis, they usually breathing if not oxygen machine help, easy to suffocate.
Sebastián Mahaluf stands out as an artist deeply engaged in weaving the complex threads of human connection, community, and the interplay of personal and collective experiences. His notable work, "CONTRADICTION AND TENSION," showcases his approach to art as a participatory experience that bridges individual perceptions with communal narratives.
Zuoxiao Zuzhou is a Chinese singer whose accented, croaky voice is hardly ever in tune. But for his fans he's the voice of a generation — one of the very few voices who dare to speak out. After a collaboration, Cowboy Junkies member Michael Timmins called him "China's Leonard Cohen."
Thich Nhat Hanh reads his poem "For Warmth" in Vietnamese, Krista Tippett reads the translation in English, excerpted from the episode "Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism."
Slippery When Wet proposes a wet ontology of Hong Kong—a city in ongoing transfiguration shifting into an uncanny vision of itself. Hong Kong secretes, leaving a trail of ink, tears, humidity, logistic flows, and leaks.
A mainland couple allowed their 2-year-old son to relieve himself by the road at Mangkok, Hong Kong and conflicted with local pedestrians who took photos of the child caused quite a stir among Chinese netizens. While the majority of mainland netizens show understanding for the couple, HongKongers think differently.
On Sept 21, 2017, the professional committee of dementia and related diseases of China geriatric health association, together with many caring enterprises, jointly launched a public welfare activity entitled "no longer forget", hoping to call on the public to pay attention to Alzheimer's disease and promote early screening.
In 2012, the 24-year-old feminist activist Xiao Meili launched the "Beautiful Women's Rights Walk" anti-sexual assault activity. She set off from Beijing in mid-September and passed through Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Changsha and other cities along the way to reach the destination Guangzhou. She took 114 days and reaches more than 2500 kilometers in this tour.