News — China

Full-scale Freedom Gundam now standing in Shanghai. It’s easy to forget how long it took Gundam to get out of Japan. The original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series premiered on Japanese TV in 1979, and for the better part of the next two decades the franchise was more or less exclusive to its home country. These days, though, Gundam is a global hit, and just like the rest of the world now gets official releases of anime and video games featuring the extended family of titular mecha, as of this month a country other than Japan has its very own...

Oliver Goldsmith   With China dominating the news of late, first with the protests in Hong Kong and now with the start and spread of the coronavirus, I find myself thinking more and more about my father-in-law.  He was born in China, in 1924, in a small village in a northern province.  Intelligent, strong, tall, and handsome, he had every expectation to build a secure and successful life in the country of his birth. Yet like many Chinese people of his generation, the communist revolution changed the arc of his story.  Starting in 1946, after the defeat of the occupying...