The author is a columnist and culture critic with China Daily
The May 12 earthquake has yielded many stories, many heartwarming or heartbreaking, but recently there has been a spate of reports that brought to light moral dilemmas that cannot be neatly categorized.
There's one scene in Hollywood disaster movies I've always hated: Oblivious to death and chaos all around and at great peril to himself and others, the hero jumps to the rescue of his own pet.
Monday afternoon was a very special occasion. The three-minute silence of mourning was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
This has been a week of grief and helplessness.
YINCHUAN, Ningxia: I was placing my recorder on the desk of deputy mayor Li Weidong when I heard the woman behind me murmuring "I feel dizzy". Another one joined her: "Me too." Then they both said: "It's an earthquake!"
To translate a word from one language to another is easy; to translate a context is hard.
Earlier this month, I was in Guangzhou for a forum on modern literature. The participants hailed mostly from academic institutions and media organizations, but you wouldn't know that if you had only heard their self-introductions. They sounded like freelancers.
Before the smoke and dust surrounding the South China tiger photos taken in Shaanxi province settled, someone claimed to have successfully photographed the big cat - widely believed to be extinct in China - in Hunan province. This time, unlike the still images from Shaanxi, it was a 20-second video clip with a very mobile animal.
In 1995, the Reichstag building in Berlin was wrapped in white sheets by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude as an art project.
The Americans have a saying: George Washington slept here.
What's in a name? More specifically, what's in the spelling of a place name? Should the Chinese capital be spelt Beijing or Peking?
At the recent powwow of the nation's top advisory body, some cultural elites proposed to add the teaching of fanti characters to the curriculum of elementary schools. In a related case, a Hong Kong representative said the Special Administrative Region should promote the use of jian-ti characters.