Public Radio International (PRI)

theatlantic:

Why a Chinese Company Wants to Own Your Local Movie Theater

There’s good chance that your local movie theater will soon be owned by a large, Chinese conglomerate. This weekend, Dalian Wanda Group announced that it would pay $2.6 billion to purchase AMC Entertainment, America’s second largest cinema chain. It would be the most expensive foreign takeover yet by a private Chinese company, a summer blockbuster for the mergers and acquisitions world.  

For those prone to anti-China hysteria, this all might sound vaguely menacing (First they came for our factories, then they came for our Kevin James vehicles…). To others, it might simply sound a bit backwards. After all, China’s domestic box office earnings are on the upswing, growing faster than Hollywood’s catalog of comic book sequels. In the United States, theater revenues have essentially been stagnant for a decade as attendance has steadily dropped. From a strictly financial point of view, there isn’t much reason for a Chinese company to start snapping up American multiplexes.  

But Dalian Wanda isn’t buying itself higher profits, at least in the short run. Rather, it’s buying an education. China plans to massively expand its own film industry in the coming years. But even more importantly, it would like to expand its cultural influence by becoming as good at producing and exporting entertainment as it is computers and phones. Much as the country’s manufacturers evolved by co-opting technology and techniques from abroad, its movie business is apparently looking to leap forward with some aid from America. 

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

newshour:

Villagers in Zhengyangguan, in China’s eastern Anhui province, raise two children dressed as a deities onto poles. The “floating ballet” is an annual ritual once celebrated in many other villages but is now on the decline with fewer children now participating.

(Photo by AFP/Getty Images)

fotojournalismus:

An ethnic Uighur vendor (3rd R) and his family sell vegetables, as his son rests under his tricycle, on a street in Uqturpan county, Xinjiang, Uyghur Autonomous Region, April 3, 2012. 

[Credit : Stringer/Reuters]

A great snapshot of family and life.

pulitzercenter:

Most of America probably now knows that Mike Daisey fabricated sections of his popular one-man play about Apple iPads and his This American Life broadcast. But China’s bloody factories are a problem much bigger than Foxconn, Adam Matthews reports:

“Wang took me on a tour that even [Mike] Daisey couldn’t have dreamed up.”

theatlantic:

In Death, Jamphel Yeshi Has Become the Face of Tibetan Dissent

Jamphel Yeshi, a Tibetan exile who set himself on fire to protest Chinese rule, died from his burns in  New Delhi on Wednesday — and has now become the symbol and a martyr for Tibetan suffering.  ”In the early evening, more than 200 people walked through the town center waving Tibetan flags and carrying banners that proclaimed Jamphel Yeshi, who died on Wednesday, a martyr,” reports The New York Times’ Edward Wong in Dharamasala, India.

Yeshi set himself on fire in New Delhi on Monday, making a statement right before Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the BRIC summit. His death on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reports, came just hours before Hu landed in the city.  As both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal confirm, Yeshi isn’t the first Tibetan exile to set himself on fire in India — The Wall Street Journal reports that at least 30 have taken place in China’s Tibetan regions.  What makes Yeshi’s different, as The New York Times details, is that Chinese forces strangled coverage of these immolations — with only a few showing up as grainy video or cell phone images. Yeshi’s self-immolation was caught by international photographers. (WARNING: Very graphic.)

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

kateoplis:

On the streets of Beijing: an electric tricycle

Where can we get one?