An underpinning of democratic participation may have led to the end of the TV hit "Super Girls" (courtesy Getty Images)

The recent Presidential elections in Taiwan have been a hot topic in Chinese discussion circles, not only due to observations of how differently politicians are treated in democratic Taiwan, but also because access to news of the democratic process down south has been surprisingly unrestrained in both state media and online. Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times reports:

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"Tape" (dir. Li Ning)

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph 

A fleet of masked vigilantes are taking Beijing—and leaving a trail of public spectacle in their wake. A trend of “superhero mimicry” growing popular in Beijing was recently reported on by J. David Goodman for the New York Times‘s Lede blog. These anonymous good Samaritans, adopting names like “The Incredible Shining Knight” and “Chinese Redbud Woman,” have been running wild on the streets of Beijing–and all over weibo and baidu blogs–engaging in small acts of public benevolence.

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"Struggle" (dir. Shu Haolun)

Shenzhen’s Foxconn factory, made famous last year by a trend of worker suicides that created a global moment of uncomfortable horror, is probably the most well-known factory in the world. Employing hundreds of thousands of young Chinese migrants and manufacturing a huge chunk of the world’s electronics—including the hand-crafting of Apple products—the controversy surrounding the Foxconn factory have been painted as a perfect storm of corporate corruption, the absence of protective labor laws and worker’s rights in China, and the imbalanced hypocrisy of a world with an exponential demand for electronics.

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Zhou Hao presents "The Transition Period"

In the wake of the now-disbanded protests in Wukan, much attention has been paid to the somewhat unconventional methods employed by Wang Yang, the CCP secretary of Guangdong Province. The New York Times‘s Sharon LaFraniere reports:

Mr. Wang, the up-and-coming Communist Party secretary of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, faced a political turning point when 13,000 irate residents of Wukan evicted their leaders and barricaded themselves in their coastal village for 13 days in a last-straw uprising against local corruption.

Given a choice of storming the village with armed police officers or conceding that the villagers’ complaints had merit, Mr. Wang chose the latter. And in a single morning, he defused a standoff that had drawn unflattering worldwide news coverage.

The decision won him praise in the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, which called it an act of “political courage” in a tense situation. Some analysts said it might have strengthened his already strong prospects to land a seat on China’s elite ruling body, the nine-member Standing Committee of the party’s Politburo, when a wave of mandatory retirements vacates seven of the seats this coming year.

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"If You Are The One" Courtesy of Reuters

Times are hard in the world of Chinese reality TV. If You Are The One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao), China’s mega-popular answer to reality TV dating shows, has been gradually feeling the pinch of SARTF’s tightening regulations on entertainment broadcasting. Edward Wong of The New York Times reports in the latest in a series of articles entitled “Culture and Control“:

[R]egulators formulated a sweeping policy that takes effect on Sunday and effectively wipes out scores of entertainment shows on prime-time television. The authorities evidently determined that trends inspired by “If You Are the One” and a popular talent show, “Super Girl,” had gone too far, and they responded with a policy to curb what they call “excessive entertainment.”

That a dating show could help set off the toughest crackdown on television in years exposes the growing tension at the heart of the Communist Party’s control of the entertainment industry. For decades, the party has pushed television networks here to embrace the market, but conservative cadres have grown increasingly fearful of the kinds of programs that court audiences, draw advertising and project a global image not shaped by the state. Television, after all, occupies a singular position in the state’s media arsenal: with its 1.2 billion viewers and more than 3,000 channels, it is the party’s greatest vehicle for transmitting propaganda, whether through the evening news or staid historical dramas.

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"The East Wind State Farm" (dir. Hu Jie)

By Maya E. Rudolph

The Cultural Revolution Cookbook, a recent title that draws on the legacy of communal agricultural during the Cultural Revolution, researched and written by Sasha Gong and Scott D. Seligman, was recently released by Earnshaw Books.

The book incorporates some realities of Cultural Revolution-era cooking and eating with a definite bend towards popular American culinary trends, asserting of the young people who cultivated these recipes in the 1960s and 70s:

They learned to prepare remarkably tasty and healthy dishes with the fresh, wholesome foods in season, to conserve scarce fuel and to improvise when ingredients were unavailable. They used locally grown produce because there wasn’t anything else. And they mastered the art of getting peak flavors and maximum nourishment out of unprocessed, low-calorie foods, devoid of artificial preservatives, fresh from the fields, ponds and streams.

These are their recipes – entirely authentic, and easy to prepare in an American kitchen.

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