Top: University Cultural Centre, National University of Singapore (Wikimedia Commons/User: Sengkang). Bottom: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. (Flickr/erinc salor)

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For many decades, through economic ups and downs, the United States has had one big consolation and wellspring of faith in the future: the second-to-none American system of higher education, with universities dominating the world in new research and new horizons.

American higher ed is still second to none. But it’s stalled out in recession and cutbacks. And Asian higher education is storming to the fore. Billions and billions are being poured into universities in China and beyond. Giant ambitions. Giant resources.

This hour, On Point: Rising Asia challenges the American university.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Jeff Selingo, editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which recently published a special report on higher education in the U.S and in Asia.

Also from Washington we’re joined by Charles Vest, former president of MIT and president of the National Academy of Engineering. He served on the National Academies panel which produced the 2006 report “Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”  It warned that the U.S. was in danger of falling behind in science and technology.

And from Toronto we’re joined by Qiang Zha, assistant professor of education at York University in Toronto, and an expert on Chinese higher education. He is a researcher for the “China’s Move to Mass Higher Education” project, an in-depth three-year study of Chinese universities and the public policy behind them.

A U.S. delegate walk past solar panels on display outside a Future House, a clean energy resident development project in Beijing, China, on July 16, 2009. (AP)

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On Capitol Hill today, the Senate introduces a bill meant to slow global warming. Meanwhile, back on the windfarm, American entrepreneurs are taking the problem seriously — as an environmental threat but also as the next great economic prize.

In China, the government says it’s determined to become a green superpower — or risk drowning in its own pollution.

Some say the next great global race is on — the clean-tech race — and that China’s entry is a “Sputnik moment.”

Has America heard the wake-up call? Is there a clean-energy race to be won or lost? This hour, On Point: China, the U.S., and the clean-energy future.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from London is Fiona Harvey, environmental reporter for The Financial Times.

Joining us from Santa Clara, Calif., is Michael Splinter, CEO of Applied Materials, a California-based company that builds the machines and the factories that make solar panels. He was recently profiled by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

From San Francisco we’re joined by Barbara Finamore, China Program Director for National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). She has worked for nearly 20 years with provincial and federal government officials in China to advise them on how to build a greener economy. She is also a founder and board member of the China-U.S. Energy Efficiency Alliance.

And from Shanghai, we’re joined by Charlie McElwee, Shanghai-based partner in the American law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. He is an expert on energy and environmental issues in China and author of the blog China Environmental Law.

Workers at a Chinese factory in Beijing last month. China strongly opposed President Barack Obama's decision to impose punitive tariffs on imports of car and light truck tires, calling it protectionism that violates World Trade Organization rules. (AP)

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The G20 sits down in Pittsburgh today — leaders of the world’s rich and emerging-rich nations.

The Obama administration is clear on what it wants out of Pittsburgh: a commitment to “rebalance” the world’s economy, for China to buy more of its own products, and Americans to make more of their own.

Coming on the heels of a fat new U.S. tariff on Chinese tires, that sounds to some like trade-war talk. Protectionism. The end of globalization as we’ve known it.

Some Americans want that. Others say, hold on.

This hour, On Point: The G20, trade, and “rebalancing” the global economy.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Zanny Minton Beddoes, economics editor for The Economist. She edited last week’s cover story, “Playing with fire,” about the Obama administration’s “alarming trade row with China.” Also see The Economist editorial, “Economic vandalism,” on Barack Obama and free trade.

Also from Washington we’re joined by Robert Scott, senior international economist and director of international programs at the Economic Policy Institute. He studies trade agreements and their impact on working people in the U.S. and other countries, as well as the macro-economic effects of trade and capital flows.

Joining us from Ithaca, New York, is Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China Division. His recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal was headlined “A Dangerous Game of Trade ‘Chicken.’”

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June 6, 1993, on the shore of Long Island — an amazing, terrible spectacle. A leaky tramp freighter, The Golden Venture, run aground in pummeling midnight seas.

It had come from halfway round the world, by way of Africa, with a hold full of would-be illegal Chinese immigrants. Half-starved, disoriented, tumbling out in the surf. Some drowning.

They were just part of a huge trade, run out of New York’s Chinatown, smuggling humans into America. “Snakeheads,” the smugglers were called.

This hour, On Point: The snakeheads, underground Chinatown, and a wild chapter in pursuit of the American dream.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

We’re joined in our studio by Patrick Radden Keefe.  He has written for The New Yorker, Slate, The New York Times, and many other publications, and he is a fellow at the Century Foundation.  His new book is “The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream.”

Read the first chapter of “The Snakehead” (pdf).

More links:

Patrick has been discussing the book in an extended online exchange with sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh at Slate.

The book’s website offers notes on the key characters, maps of the Golden Venture’s voyage and the Chinatown neighborhood, and links.

Here’s a video trailer showing Chinatown’s streets and the restaurant run by Sister Ping:

In an On Point blog post, Tom Ashbrook recalls his days on the “snakehead” beat as a rooking reporter in Hong Kong for the South China Morning Post.

Also check out WBUR’s “Inside Out” documentary “Snakeheads and Slavery.”

Egyptian villagers watch a live broadcast of the speech by President Barack Obama at Cairo University from a coffee shop in Qena, south Cairo, on June 4, 2009. (AP)

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Tectonic shifts this week.

General Motors actually in bankruptcy. Straight up bankrupt.

An American president, middle name Hussein, in Egypt speaking Arabic and quoting the Koran in ardent outreach to the Muslim world.

In the skies over the mid-Atlantic, a French airliner mysteriously down with 228 aboard.

And in church in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller — serving as an usher on a Sunday morning — shot and killed in the church foyer by an anti-abortion crusader. He was 67.

This hour, On Point: Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

From Washington, we’re joined by Tony Blankley, columnist for The Washington Times and author of “American Grit: What It Will Take to Survive and Win in the 21st Century.”

From Paris, France, we’re joined by Christopher Dickey, Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek. His latest book is “Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force – the NYPD.”

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Something which is really noticable, and all foreigners are discussing it, is that this event has simply been air-brushed from collective knowledge in China. It is routine to encounter university audiences who have never heard of the events of Tiananmen Square 20 years ago — 20 years ago, two days from now.

[Jim later added this June 4 coverage update on his blog . And others offer roundups of China's media censorship leading up to June 4, including blocking Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and other sites.]

According to NPR’s Anthony Kuhn, the Chinese media are in an interesting stage of transition, with some organizations now only loosely affiliated with the government. His recent report, “China Launches Global Media Blitz,” looked at the intriguing new state-backed paper, Global Times. (Update: Global Times does indeed report on Tiananmen — credit to listener RollerGirlLois, see below…)

But most outlets are state dominated — hewing to the “nationalist,” Communist Party line. If you’ve never seen China’s government-run English-language television station, CCTV, it’s worth a visit online. Here’s the segment we played audio from during our show today, to illustrate the Chinese internal response to Geithner. If you listen to Professor Huo Deming of Peking University giving his analysis on CCTV, you hear something that sounds pretty even-handed — something you could imagine a Western academic saying. Is it the party line? Who knows…

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, third from right, speaks during a meeting with Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan, third from left, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday, June 1, 2009. (AP)

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While Barack Obama was dealing with the bankruptcy of GM yesterday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was in Beijing, dealing with what may be even bigger issues for the USA.

China is now the biggest holder of U.S. government debt. When the U.S. spends money on GM or Iraq or stimulus at home, that is — in a very real sense — China’s money.

Geithner was there to make sure Chinese leaders believe the U.S. is good for it. A new poll, out while he was there, found 87 percent of Chinese respondents believe it is not.

This hour, On Point: Soothing America’s banker — China.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is James Fallows, national correspondent and widely read blogger for The Atlantic. He’s been based in China since 2006, and his latest book, “Postcards from Tomorrow Square,” collects his articles for the magazine during that time. His piece “Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money,” an interview with the president of China Investment Corporation, appeared in the December 2008 issue.

In our studio we’re joined by Li Jin, professor of finance at Harvard Business School. He has taught at Fudan University in Shanghai and served as a consultant for Shanghai International Securities Co. Ltd.

And from New York we’re joined by Brad Setser, economist and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked at the U.S. Treasury Department and the International Monetary Fund. You can read his latest thoughts at his blog, Follow the Money.

A view of Shanghai, China, March 2009. (AP)

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China just gets bigger as a global issue, a global power. One year ago this month, we packed up On Point and went on the road to China, broadcasting live for a week from the heart of Shanghai.

Today, we’ll turn our microphones back to China, to look at the big changes of the last year: an earthquake in Sichuan, an epic Olympics in Beijing, and economic meltdown all over.

China’s been hit by the meltdown, too. But it’s also emerged, more clearly than ever, as the cash-rich banker to America — with all that means.

This hour, On Point: One year on, we look back to China.

You can join the conversation. After earthquake and Olympics and economic meltdown, how do you see China now? Still on the rise? On a sidetrack? Treasury to the world? Partner? Or something else?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Anthony Kuhn, Beijing correspondent for National Public Radio.

Joining us from Beijing is Sun Zhe, professor at the Institute for International Studies and director of the Center for U.S.-China relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. A wise voice last year with us in Shanghai, he is one of China’s leading scholars in the field of U.S.-China relations and American Studies.

And with us from Shanghai is Fang Xinghai, Director General in the Office for Financial Services in the Shanghai Metropolitan Government and former Deputy CEO of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. A U.S.-educated mover and shaker in the Chinese Communist Party, he also joined us last year in Shanghai.

“On Point in Shanghai”
See the special site we created for our week of broadcasts from Shanghai, April 14-18, 2008. You’ll find all ten shows, along with links, slideshows, videos, music, and listener comments. Plus, host Tom Ashbrook’s daily posts.

Photo: csaveanu/flickr

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OK, the April Fool’s computer virus didn’t strike, didn’t rise up with its “botnet” and take over the world. But maybe it didn’t have to.

Just days before, a crack team of computer sleuths in Canada unveiled a global computer spying network, apparently run out of China, called “GhostNet.”

It’s a spying operation that has reached into more than a thousand key computers around the world, rifling through high-security files, even turning on computers’ cameras and microphones to watch and listen from halfway round the world.

This hour, On Point: The team who cracked the “GhostNet.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Toronto is Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and the co-lead investigator on the team that exposed “GhostNet.” (Read their report here.) He also teaches political science and is co-founder and a principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor.

Joining us from Washington, D.C., is Rafal Rohozinski, co-lead investigator, with Ron Diebert, on the team that exposed “GhostNet,” and a founder and principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor. He is also a principal at The SecDev Group, a private think tank and consultancy with clients in “countries and regions at risk from violence and insecurity.” Its clients have included the U.S. Department of Defense.

Also from Washington, we’re joined by Siobhan Gorman, intelligence correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Comrade (cover)

In the still-hot years of Red China’s Cultural Revolution, 19-year-old Chinese-Canadian Jan Wong became one of the rare foreigners admitted to Beijing University.

She was a fired-up young “Montreal Maoist” off to the land of Mao. And once there, she soon betrayed a young Chinese classmate who wanted out. That bright young woman was banished to the countryside and hard labor.

Years later, Jan Wong’s guilt gnawed at her. She went back to try to find the woman and make right the wrong. It’s an incredible, enlightening story.

This hour, On Point: Jan Wong and “A Comrade Lost and Found.”

You can join the conversation. Can you imagine being a young foreigner in Mao’s China, wanting so badly to fit in that you betray a fellow student who confides that she wants to leave? Would you go back and try to make it right?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Jan Wong joins us from Toronto. From 1988 to 1994, she was  Beijing correspondent for The Toronto Globe and Mail. She later became a columnist for that newspaper and left in 2006. Her new book is “A Comrade Lost and Found: A Beijing Story.” She’s also author of the previous memoir “Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now.”

Read an excerpt from “A Comrade Lost and Found.”

James Fallows

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The Chinese New Year kicks off today: the Year of the Ox. Across China it’s firecrackers and New Year’s celebration.

But for the first time in years, China’s new year is not roaring in on an economic boom. After years of roaring double-digit growth, China’s export-driven economy has hit the skids. Factories closing. Millions out of work. And a new administration in Washington has already crossed swords with Beijing over the Chinese currency and trade.

China-watcher James Fallows has spent the last two and a half years in the country, digging deep into China’s realities and complexities. This hour, On Point: We’re looking at China with James Fallows.

You can join the conversation. What do you see ahead for China, and China-US relations, in the Year of the Ox? What’s your question on China now?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He’s been based in China since 2006, and his new book, “Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China,” collects his articles for The Atlantic during that time.  He’s the author of several other books, including “Blind Into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq” (2006) and “Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System” (1995).

You can read an excerpt from “Postcards” at the Random House site. And for Fallows’ latest thoughts on China, U.S. politics, and much else, see his widely read Atlantic blog.

Police stand guard as workers gather in a standoff over a wage dispute at the gate of Jianrong Suitcase Factory in Dongguan, China, on Dec. 19, 2008. (AP)

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Has any year ever begun with more of the world’s fate and fortune riding on China? Maybe not.

Thirty years ago last month, Deng Xiaoping put China on the path to its own brand of market capitalism. It’s been an explosion ever since. Now, at the dawn of 2009, China’s having trouble: Exports down, factories closing, millions losing jobs.

But more than ever, the world is tied into what China does next. Obama’s big stimulus? Chinese billions would make it happen. And then there’s China’s own stability.

This hour, On Point: China’s next move.

You can join the conversation. Is this just a Chinese hiccup? Will China refuel the U.S. economy? Will U.S. consumers restart the Chinese miracle?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Anthony Kuhn, Beijing correspondent for NPR. See an archive of his recent reports from China at NPR.org.

From Shanghai we’re joined by James Areddy, Shanghai correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.  Last month the Journal reported on rising unrest as China’s economy falters.  He was with us in Shanghai last April.

Also from Shanghai is Shen Dingli, professor and executive dean of Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies. He’s also a fellow at the Asia Society, a global organization based in New York.

The Dalai Lama, right, confers with Samdhong Rinpoche, Prime Minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, in Dharmsala, India, Nov. 20, 2008. (AP)

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For decades now, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has smiled and talked of peace and won Western hearts — and dreamed of autonomy for Tibet.

And China has listened, intermittently, and said no, consistently.

This fall, after riots in Tibet last spring, China said no loudly — flatly rejecting Tibetan autonomy and the Dalai Lama’s smiling appeals.

For the last week, more than 500 Tibetan exiles from across the world gathered in Dharamsala, India, to debate their way forward: whether to stick with the Dalai Lama’s peaceful “middle way,” search for autonomy within China, or to reach openly for independence. Whether to pray, to fight, to wait, to hope.

Their path looks as steep as the Himalayas.

This hour, On Point: The Dalai Lama, China, and the fate of Tibet.

You can join the conversation. Are you still rooting for the red-robed Buddhists and their struggle to reclaim their kingdom at the “roof of the world”? Will that struggle outlast the Dalai Lama? Will old Tibet simply disappear one day under a wave of Chinese immigration and development?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

We’re joined from Dharamsala by Tsewang Rigzin. He is president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile group that advocates full independence from China.

From Vancouver, we’re joined by Tsering Wangdu Shakya, a Tibetan scholar and professor at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Asian Research. Born in Lhasa, he fled to India with his family after the Chinese invasion. He is the author of “The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947,” which The New York Times called “the definitive history of modern Tibet.”

Joining us from New York is Robbie Barnett, director of the Modern Tibetan Studies program at Columbia University.

And from Melbourne Australia, we’re joined by Cameron Stewart. An associate editor at The Australian. He was in Tibet in early November, one of only a handful of Western journalists to have been in Tibet since the March riots.

]]> http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/11/the-fate-of-tibet/feed 34 http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/10/chinas-factory-girls http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/10/chinas-factory-girls#comments Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:00:55 +0000 Wen Stephenson http://www.onpointradio.org/?p=12619 Post your comments below

If you dig far enough down in the world economy today — and you won’t have to dig long — you come to the giant factories of China.

They are massive. Whole cities of production. They turn out a huge portion of every manufactured thing you touch and wear and use these days.

And the bulwark of those factories is a whole generation of young migrant women — factory girls — who have flooded from China’s poor countryside to the factory floor. Know them — and their dreams — and you know the new heart and mind of the world economy.

This hour, On Point: China’s surprising, ambitious factory girls.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Leslie T. Chang, author of “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China.” She spent a decade in China as Beijing correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

» Read an excerpt from “Factory Girls.”

Anthony Kuhn, NPR’s Beijing correspondent. You can hear his latest reports at NPR.org.

On Point has spent a lot of time looking closely at China, from many angles, and as Tom noted today, we even took the show to Shanghai for a week in April. Now that we’re in the homestretch of these Beijing Games, you might be interested to listen back to some of those shows, and others we’ve produced in the past year, for a many-faceted view of China at this moment in its history.

Two of our Shanghai shows, in particular, stand out for me. In a show we called “Young China,” we talked with three Chinese students, two in Shanghai and one in Beijing, who gave us a full-throated, party-line perspective on their country that many were surprised to hear from mouths of students. No dissidents, these. (Later that week we spent an hour talking head-on about dissent in China with three top voices on the subject.)

And in our final show from Shanghai, we talked with two of China’s most distinguished scholars of U.S.-China relations about the way forward for these two great powers. A memorable hour. That show, and Tom’s parting thoughts from Shanghai, offered much food for further thought.

As always, there’s so much more to be said. We can never exhaust this topic. Curious to hear your thoughts about our China coverage overall, and how the rest of the media has presented China in the long runnup to these Olympics, as well as during the Games. I have a feeling we’ll all be chewing this over for a long time to come.

Olympic and Chinese flags fly near the portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, Aug. 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

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What will we remember from the towering spectacle of the Beijing Olympic Games — about sport, about media coverage, about China?

From those massed drummers of the opening ceremony, to the eight medals on swimmer Michael Phelps, to the lightning speed of Jamaican Usain Bolt and Beijing’s eye-popping facilities, everything has seemed larger than life … except perhaps those tiny Chinese gymnasts.

China, NBC, and a whole lot of athletes wanted gold out of Beijing — and there’s a lot to go around. This hour, from sport to media to China’s bottom line, we’re scoring the Olympics.

Have you loved the Games, hated them, been riveted — or not? What image of sports, of China, will stick in your mind? And how about the way we’ve been shown, or not shown, the Games and the host nation by NBC and by China? How do you score these Olympics as a media event? What have you learned, or not learned, about China? You can join the conversation right here. Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from London is Rob Gifford, NPR’s London bureau chief. He was NPR’s Beijing bureau chief for six years and is the author of “China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power.” He was last in China following the earthquakes in May.

From Washington, we’re joined by Paul Farhi. A staff writer for The Washington Post since 1988, he currently covers popular culture, the media, politics, and other subjects for the Post’s Style section and writes washingtonpost.com’s Olympics blog, “Playback: The Games on TV.”

And from Laurel, Maryland, we’re joined by David Steele, longtime sports columnist for The Baltimore Sun, Michael Phelps’ hometown paper.

Chinese pianist Lang Lang performs with the Stockholm Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. June 13, 2008. (AP)

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Twenty-six year old Chinese pianist Lang Lang is an international superstar and the face of a new China. He played a prominent role in Beijing’s lavish opening ceremony on Friday.

But the road to fame hasn’t been easy. He’s been working at it since the age of 3. His parents’ dreams thwarted by the Cultural Revolution, Lang Lang became their future. At 9, he moved with his father to Beijing. At 15, they traveled to America.

He studied at top schools and is now, some argue, one of the best classical pianists in the world — and a phenomenon in China.

This hour, On Point: China’s Lang Lang.

* * *

Guests:

Lang Lang, internationally acclaimed classical pianist, he played at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, and is author of the new book, with David Ritz, “Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story.”

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. He profiled Lang Lang in the magazine’s August 4 issue.

Links and multimedia:

Read an excerpt from Lang Lang’s “Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story.”

Langlang.com – The official website of Lang Lang

Watch a famous YouTube video of Lang Lang playing Chopin with orange:

A list of the music played during this hour:

• Xian Xinghai: “Prelude: The Song of The Yellow River Boatmen”
• Franz Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
• Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1 In C Major, Op. 15 – III. Rondo.
• Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme Of Paganini, Op. 43: Variation XVIII
• Happy Times – [From the 2007 album Dragon Songs]
• Horses – a live recording at Carnegie Hall, a duet with his father, Guo-Ren Lang on the Erhu, a traditional Chinese two-stringed fiddle.
• He Luting: The Cowherd’s Flute (Mutong duandi)
• Chopin: Sonata for Piano No. 3 in B Minor, B. 155, Op. 58: II. Scherzo (Molto Vivace)
• Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor, Op. 23, I.
• Mozart: Sonata for Piano No. 10 in C Major, K. 330
• Xian Xinghai: The Yellow River: III. The Yellow River in wrath

A woman walks through her courtyard home in one of Beijing's hutongs on March 23, 2006. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

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The images out of Beijing this summer are astounding, with gleaming new architecture front and center and dramatic. The Olympic “Bird’s Nest” stadium with its profusion of swooping steel. Shimmering towers, mile after mile. Triumphant new landmarks, one after another.

What you don’t see is what’s wiped away, or barely hanging on. The miles of “hutong” alleyway neighborhoods that, until very recently, made Beijing the world’s last modern capitol with a living medieval heart.

This hour On Point: the last days of old Beijing, with an American who lived there.

Have you seen the transformation of China’s capital? What’s gained and what’s lost when a city as ancient as Beijing goes hyper-modern? You can join the conversation — post your comments below.

- Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Michael Meyer, author of the new book “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed.” He first went to China in 1995, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Sichuan. He moved to Beijing in 1997 and has lived there for most of the years since, working as an English teacher and a freelance writer.

Also in Beijing, we’re joined by Li Hu, a partner at the New York-based firm Steven Holl Architects. He and his firm have designed “Linked Hybrid,” one of the big new projects now going up on the Beijing skyline. It’s a complex of luxury, mixed use high-rises with parks built on skyways between the buildings’ upper floors, cinemas, shops, schools, and more.

Links:

You can read an excerpt from “The Last Days of Old Beijing” on NPR.org.

View photos from the Flickr group ‘Beijing Hutong’:

Mapping the New Beijing
Architectural Record offers a fascinating look at Beijing’s new architecture. See especially the section “Project Porfolio: Beijing,” which has images and descriptions of major architectural projects around the city.

Attendees at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Darfur and the Olympics, June 7, 2007 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Genocide Intervention Network)

It’s almost show time for the Olympic Games in Beijing.

China fought hard to get the games, and has spent at a level without precedent on preparations that have remade its capitol and wide swaths of the country.

For activists, the Olympics were a chance, when China was at its most sensitive, to push the country on Darfur, Tibet, human rights and its own legal system.

Now, with the opening ceremony in Beijing just days away, August 8th, we’re looking at where China has moved under that pressure. Where it hasn’t. And what may come next.

This hour, On Point: Olympic leverage and what it’s wrought with China in the homestretch to the Beijing Games.

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Melinda Liu, Beijing bureau chief for Newsweek. She writes the “Countdown to Beijing” blog at Newsweek.com. She opened Newsweek’s Beijing Bureau in 1980 and is president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.

Joining us from Amherst, Massachusetts, is Eric Reeves. He has been at the center of a global campaign against China’s policy on Darfur and Sudan, labeling the Beijing Olympics the “Genocide Olympics.” He is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide.”

And joining us from New York is Jerome Cohen, one of the world’s top authorities on China’s legal system and Chinese human rights. He is a professor at New York University School of Law and a senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Image from the documentary All In This Tea.

All the tea in China is a lot of tea.

But intrepid connoisseur tea man David Lee Hoffman wanted the best tea in China, and he went off in search of it — into the misty green tea mountains and markets of China with documentary filmmaker Les Blank at his side.

They came back with a story of Oolong and Camel’s Breath, Drum Mountain and Dragon Well. And of how tea and nature meet — in the mouth, and mind, and Chinese lives.

This hour, On Point: Tea importer David Lee Hoffman, global tea guru James Norwood Pratt, and San Francisco tea maven Roy Fong, on all the tea in China.

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

David Lee Hoffman, tea importer and subject of the new documentary, “All In This Tea.” (The website includes a trailer, background on the story, and information on screenings and how to order the DVD.)

James Norwood Pratt, leading expert on tea and author of “The Tea-Lover’s Treasury.”

Roy Fong, founder and proprietor of San Francisco’s Imperial Tea Court. (The site features a monthly newsletter, “Tea Readings.”)