Darwaz Art：Airing the Daring

IN Darwaz a misstep means certain death. The word is straightforward, meaning ＂walking on a rope in the air＂ in the Uygur language. Tightrope walking is a traditional sport of this ethnic group in China.     

Moves Afoot to Subdue Smog

正SMOG has been the bane of Chinese people’s lives in recent years.But as Premier Li Keqiang recently announced to the nation and the entire international community,China is to declare war on pollution.Although fraught     

Riding Out the Freeze

IT was at the lowest level I’ve ever experienced, says Li Zhongjian, describing last year’s business confidence in Zhejiang Province’s economic powerhouse, Wenzhou. Li, who has been doing business for 30-odd years, is president of Wenzhou Orient Light Industry Co., Ltd, one of the city’s most prominent enterprises. Nowadays, however, Li is cautiously hopeful about the future. After the release of the China’s 12th Five-year Plan (2011-2015) for the Growth of Small     

Weibo, Changing Our Lives

A photograph, a video or up to 140 characters of text - these are the tools of communication available to users of Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service that commands a large and growing following on the Chinese mainland. In August of 2009, the popular news and entertainment website Sina.com.cn launched a test version of Sina Weibo, becoming one of the first mainland web companies to experiment with a microblogging service. According to statistics from the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), by the first half     

Building a More Prosperous Yamda

CLAD in a white fleece coat and pink woolen hat, Purbu sits on the thick carpet of her new two-storey house and sips from a bottle of juice. The small table beside her is piled up with candies and snacks, glossy Tibetan-style furniture fills the room and the windows, whose thick glass keeps out the harsh winter wind, offer a view of her spacious yard from which a yak peeps curiously into the room. Enjoying an hour of leisure, our hostess confesses that sometimes she is not sure if she is in a dream, and has to pinch her-     

Keeping the Legend of the Fish Skin Tribe Alive

BEFORE synthetic fibers were invented and their prices were brought down within the reach of the populace, people clothed themselves with the natural materials available in the surroundings where they lived and worked everyday. These vary from bark of trees to hide of animals. In the case of the Hezhens, an ethnic group in northeastern China, it is fish dermis. The Hezhens live in the plains along the Heilong, Songhua and Wusuli rivers in northeastern China. With a popula-     

Reviving Residents’ Committees

TO urbanites on China’s mainland, residents’ committees are the closest basic social unit to families and their danwei, or work unit-traditionally a tightly knit community. The first residents’ committee in the PRC was established in Hangzhou’s Shangcheng District, Zhejiang Province, on October 23,1949.     

The Future of Tradition-Developing Hebei’s Craftsmanship Culture

HAVING studied for eight years, longer than most doctors spend in medical school, Zhang Wusuo is a highly proficient stonecutter. Zhang developed an early interest in traditional stone carving and at age 18, refusing to become a blacksmith like his father, set off to Quy- ang County for a stonecutting education. After two years of training, Zhang began to carve simple designs such as flowerbeds and fountain foundations. Nowadays he is accomplished and capable of creating Western-style statues, the mastery     

The Changing World of Social Work

WEARING a ponytail, 29-year-old Wang Qi has an infectious smile and a bright, capable look about her. In spite of her youth, she is director of the Donggaodi Community service station in Beijing’s Fengtai District. In the three years that she has dedicated herself to community-based social work, Wang admits that she has had to learn a lot on the job. The residents in the community highly appreciate her efforts.     

China’s Giant Leap in Space Exploration

AT 10:03 am on June 29,the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft returned to Earth to land in northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region,ending the 302-hour journey in space of the operation’s three astronauts,Jing Haipeng,Liu Wang and Liu Yang,China’s first woman astronaut.