About
Transpacifica is primarily written by me, Graham Webster. I'm an analyst, journalist, and consultant on East Asian politics and technology. Here, I write about East Asian politics mostly in China and Japan, the Internet and society, the environment, and contemporary art. Unavoidably, I sometimes veer off topic—even with a topic as large as the Pacific.
By day, I work at the EastWest Institute in New York City, but all opinions are my own and do not represent EWI or any of my other clients or employers.
Twitter: @gwbstr.
Website: gwbstr.com.-
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Blogs by Academics
- 冷知识 Cool Knowledge – Hu Yong
- China Rhyming
- Elite Chinese Politics and Political Economy – Victor Shih
- 花崗齋雜記 Jottings from the Granite Studio
- Frog in a Well – The China History Group Blog
- Frog in a Well – The Japan History Group Blog
- Japan Focus
- RConversation
- The China Beat
- YouMeiTi 有媒体 – Tricia Wang
China
- 两元文化奇物 (biculturalfreak.net)
- China and the World – Ella Chou
- China Digital Times
- China Financial Markets – Michael Pettis
- China Law Blog
- China Media Project at HKU
- Dance to the Revolution – Ella Chou
- Danwei.org
- EastSouthWestNorth
- James Fallows
- Letters from China – Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
- See China
- Shanghaiist
- Sinocentric
- The China Game
- The China Reader – Lyle Morris
- The China Tracker – Forbes
- The China Vortex
- The Opposite End of China
- Wangjianshuo’s Blog
Environment
Friends (non-Transpacific)
Internet and Society
Japan
Me Elsewhere
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This work by Transpacifica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tag Archives: China
China citizen database proposal is nothing radically new
A Chinese official proposed the creation of a database of every citizen in China, reports The New York Times. Zhou Yongkang, a former head of the Public Security Bureau Ministry, “said the system should be based on the resident identity … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged China, e-government, informatization, journalism, Zhou Yongkang
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Amartya Sen on Quality of Life in India and China
In the New York Review of Books, Amartya Sen describes several ways we can assess the differences in quality of life in China and India. He points to China’s economic and public goods strength, but argues that other values, including … Continue reading
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Tagged Amartya Sen, China, development, India, quality of life
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Three great paragraphs on the internet and Chinese ‘revolution’
This from Guobin Yang of Barnard College, Columbia University, in The New York Times: Protest is also increasingly common on the Internet. I recently counted 60 major cases of online activism, ranging from extensive blogging to heavily trafficked forums to … Continue reading
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Tagged China, contention, Guobin Yang, protest, revolution, The New York Times, Yang Guobin
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Police-led protests? Satire and the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ [translation]
Twitter and several online communities lit up last night with talk of gatherings in several cities in China that had apparently been organized online and were given the moniker “Jasmine Revolution.” The people who gathered, according to the reports I’ve … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Beijing, blog, China, Jasmine Revolution, pictures, protest, translation, Wangfujing
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The fate of the UCCA art space in 798
Early today I put a new header image at the top of this site. It’s cropped from a picture of an artist working on a grand installation in the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, a gallery/museum in Beijing’s 798 art … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Art and Design, China, RedBox Review, UCCA, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
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The internet entrepôts of China: back to the 19th century?
For centuries, and especially since the mid-19th century, entrepôts have been important sites of communication—both information and goods—between China and the outside world. Now, many of the same cities are sites of the grand digital switches that connect China to … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged China, Ella Chou, entrepôt, geography, Han-Teng Liao, Internet, map, TeleGeography, treaty ports
4 Comments
‘Please Vote for Me’ documentary and political culture
I’m in the midst of watching Please Vote for Me, a documentary based on elections for head student of an elementary school class in Wuhan, China. I am not the first to say it, but this is an excellent film. … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged China, documentary, film, Please Vote For Me, political culture, politics, Video
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On the unfortunate presentism of China political science
From Neil J. Diamant on why we might want to study things before Reform and Opening in order to understand Chinese politics: “Given the short history of the PRC, and that much of what we have learned about its politics … Continue reading
Pollution from space, and human geography
A remarkable photograph published by NASA shows, as Angel Hsu notes, the pollution in the air during the climate talks in Tianjin earlier this month. The high-resolution image is striking, and will live on the desktop of my external monitor … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Angel Hsu, China, COP16, Environment, geography, image, NASA, pollution, Tianjin
2 Comments