How to Stay Up-To-Date on China

I would like to let everyone know exactly how I get my information and stay up to date on China. Although Democracy Now!, The Economist, and Foreign Policy are mainstays of my general news intake, this post is going to be focused on China-specific news. This is mainly meant for people who wish to be well-informed and stay up-to-date on China issues. I will divide this into four categories: Podcasts, Blogs, Tweets, and other sites.

PODCASTS
Podcasts are perhaps the most convenient way I have of consuming information. The fact that it is given to me through an audio medium means that I do not need to use my eyes or my hands, making it ideal for consuming while walking, talking the bus, or doing other tasks. Of all the ways I have of consuming information, podcasts lend themselves to multitasking to a far greater extent than any other format.

The combination of the Sinica Podcast and The China History Podcast, hosted by Kaiser Kuo and Lazlo Montegomery, provide excellent information of the china of today and of history. Kaiser and his friends have very high quality discussions about a wide range of issues relevant to contemporary China, while Lazlo Montegomery is clearly well versed in his field and delivers very informative and very digestible summaries of Chinese History.

BLOGS

Although there are plenty of blogs I would like to recommend on language learning and other interesting things, I will limit this to China-related blogs.

To start out fairly light-hearted, I would highly recommend ChinaSmack to anyone interested in the popular and sensationalist news that is happening in China. From BDSM Dungeons in Nanjing to Chinese netizen's reactions to important international political events, this gives the reader a quick glimpse at what is happening online for Chinese people. To get good recommendations of Chinese (including Taiwanese and Hong Kong) movies, as well as films from Japan and South Korea I would say that Populasian is a great resource. I have been pointed to numerous high-quality film through this blog, and without it I would have missed out on the vast majority of quality film that I have seen over the past year. Moving to more serious readings, ChinaGeeks does an excellent job analyzing news, and the folks at The China Beat to a great job reporting on it. China Hearsay, Mark's China Blog, and The Peking Duck all provide good information to me on a more seriously level than movies of SM in Nanjing. The mainstays of my blog digest, though, consist of China Digital Times and Danwei, both blocked in China, and both highly attuned to political news, and (in my opinion) valuable fonts of straightforward information about China in the modern day. Aside from the two behemoths of online China news in the form of CTD and Danwei, I find Fool's Mountain to be some of the most intelligent blogging about china on the web today. Some posts on Africans living in China and some vicious racism concerning a black/Chinese girl were some of my favorites. (the complete list of blogs that I follow is available here)

TWEETS
I just started using Twitter a few weeks ago, but after a few incidents of being aware of events before said events were reported in the western media (beating the New York Times on the news is certainly a point of pride for me!), I now swear by it as an excellent way to get up to the minute information. Of the few dozen Twitter accounts that I follow(the full list can be found here), imagethief, niubi, ChinaGeeks, Jeremy Goldkorn, and GadyEpstein tend to give me the best information. Aside from that, a lot of these guys (along with Kaiser Kuo, FoundinChina and David Moser) talk with each other via Twitter too, so following their conversations can give me some excellent clues. The Asia Society, an excellent resource in general, has their own Twitter account, and Eric Olander focuses intelligently only China-Africa issues.

OTHER NEWS SOURCES
I want to recommend all kinds of global news sources, from Times of India (most widely read English-language newspaper in the world)  to Al Jazeera (now a widely respected source of world news), I will again restrict myself to China-relevant news sources. Within this category of the obligatory Wall Street Journal's China topic page and the New York Times's China page (a great number of NYT's china articles are authored by Edward Wong, whom I am beginning to respect). Aside from those big names are anything that The Economist or Foreign Policy happens to have on China, while the East Asia Forum is a bit more of a focused and specialized site. I get all of this information through Google Reader by use of RSS feeds, which I highly recommend EVERYONE look into as a fast an easy way of having your news delivered to you.

And that is everything. All the information I wield about current events in China come from the resources listed on this blog post. Although I by no means consider myself an expert on China (except perhaps in the realm of China's minzu and ethnicities, but even that would be a pretty shaky claim: all I did was read a hell of a lot of sources and the summarize some of them), with these fonts of information supporting me I hope to gain more and more knowledge of China and it's role in the world.