Crime and Punishment
I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure the Chinese legal system works like a lottery. The judges, if they haven’t been bribed or given a decision by higher officials, spin a comically oversized wheel a la Wheel of Fortune or Price is Right and go with whatever it says.
This morning, the Intermediate People’s Court of Xi’an sentenced Yao Jiaxin, the 21-year-old student at the Xi’an Conservatory of Music who ran over and subsequently stabbed to death cafeteria assistant Zhang Miao, because, as we all know, a “peasant woman would be hard to deal with.”
48: Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
Cinema is ideological — that’s just a statement of fact, because it’s true for anything produced for any form of media. Either a film, through its plot and its form, is trying to communicate something about our world, or its refusal to do so is a statement itself. The mainstream Hollywood package of style and [...]
47: Fair Game (2010)
As far as political scandals go, I find the Valerie Plame affair to be especially intriguing, and not only because I have a soft spot for female covert operatives who face the dilemma between patriotism and family. The Plame debacle (in which her identity as a CIA operative was leaked by a source in the White House in 2003 after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, publicly torpedoed the administration’s claims that Iraq had been trying to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger) reveals an intense anxiety that the rule of law’s sway over political action is merely a thinly-veiled sham over petty vendetta and ideological crusading. It makes visible the presidency in its most imperial form: embarrassing those in charge could result in the full force of governmental vengeance grinding you into the dust.
46: Sucker Punch (2011)
“This critical paroxysm against Sucker Punch is quite possibly the most colossal collective misreading of satire since Paul Verhoeven was accused of being a fascist for Starship Troopers. With this film, critics are making the same mistake of confusing depiction for endorsement, but more importantly, they seem continually befuddled by Snyder’s manipulation of one of the most [...]
Upping The Ante
I wrote yesterday about Google’s ongoing struggle with the Chinese government. Just last night, Chinese media reported that Google and three companies affiliated with it are now under investigation for Chinese tax fraud:
Three companies affiliated with the search engine Google have been investigated for tax fraud in China, Thursday’s Economic Daily reported, citing sources with China’s tax authority.
The companies have been found using fake invoices, and accounting and business tax irregularities were also discovered that involved more than 40 million yuan (6.06 million U.S. dollars), the newspaper said.
Google is also under investigation for tax evasion, the newspaper said.
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