Mary Kay Magistad looks at China’s long road to space exploration:
“The Cultural Revolution was raging in the late 1960s when the first American walked on the moon. Jia Weixin was then a university student, studying atmospheric physics. But in the Cultural Revolution’s anti-intellectual environment, his classes kept being suspended, scientific advancement retarded, and he didn’t let himself think about the significance of that event…”

Mary Kay Magistad explains what was so heartbreaking about Liu Xiang’s decision to walk away:

“Liu Xiang had become a symbol — a symbol of China’s rise, a symbol of China’s, sort of, muscularity in the international arena. And for him to walk away from the blocks really hit people hard here.”

On PRI’s “The World,” Mary Kay Magistad reports that “disabled people in China are drawing inspiration from disabled athletes competing in the Beijing Olympics.”

Hip hop artist Wang Xiaolei, featured on PBS’s Frontline documentary Young & Restless in China:

“I asked Wang what happened to the sharp social commentary in his earlier work…

‘It’s hard to say. Sometimes when I was younger, I’d feel angry and say so, and afterwards I’d forget about it. If you’re standing in the street, you can see many things that can make you angry. But if you don’t think about it too much, it’s ok. There’s a Buddhist poem i like, that goes, ‘The heart of a human is like a clear mirror. You must always remember to wipe it, and not let dirt curb its bright nature.’ Actually, in the past half year, I’ve realized that much of the anger I felt was just created by myself.’”

PRI’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Shenzhen on the largest migration in the history of the world — China’s rapid urbanization — which has turned former fishing villages like Shenzhen into mega-cities.

Christopher Merril talks about “Wolf Totem” by Jiang Rong and “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” by Mo Yan, two works recently translated into English, both “born out of the ashes of the cultural revolution in China… both tell stories of modern China, but in very different ways.”

According to Ma Jian, the exiled author of Beijing Coma, the American media “should step up the pressure it puts on the Chinese government. Otherwise, all that is wrong with China will become a virus that will infect the world.”