Sources for news on Asia

Chinastudygroup.net (a broad-left site i'm involved with) mainly re-posts news from other sites, but we may catch something you miss, and you can subscribe to have (almost) daily news updates emailed to you. Also, we're trying to get more people to start blogging, so the new site may have more original reports in the future.

ChinaSmack and ESWN are also good sites for English overviews and translations of Chinese sources - ChinaSmack especially has an eye for social conflicts.

If you can read Chinese, keep an eye on HK Indymedia, Taiwan Indymedia (neither affiliated with the global IMC network), & KuLaoWang (a Taiwan-based labor news site). Those also report some mainland news. Of course such websites can't survive on the mainland, so the mainland equivalent to indymedia is posting threads on huge forum sites like Tianya until they get deleted by the cybercops, then moving them somewhere else. There used to be some Maoist sites with forums for social conflicts, but they're all shut down or blocked now, as far as I know. Some things still get posted & discussed on the broad-left site Utopia, although they were only allowed to go back up after promising not to get involved in sensitive matters a few years ago.

If you can read German, see Welt in Umwälzung for news and Gongchao for analysis (some of which is translated into English on prol-position).

Thanks for setting up this blog and keeping these reports coming. This the first English ultra-left/ anti-authoritarian site I know of with a section on China.

in English and French: http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?rubrique43 & http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?rubrique127

For those who can read Chinese, a friend just introduced me to a mainland China forum for workers' news and mutual aid called Workers' Forum. ("Chuizi" in the url means "hammer" in reference to the sickle & hammer.) I'll try to write an overview of ongoing struggles mentioned there soon. (I'll also try to figure out why it's not blocked or shut down!)

to the west of your area, but reaching into mongolia and sometimes china
http://www.eurasianet.org/
liberal/NGO

I wrote an overview of that Workers' Forum and affiliated sites here. Will post something about workers' struggles discussed there in a few days.

you can get ad-ons for fire fox that will convert between traditional and simplified, that might help.

Here is something that started out as a report on a workers struggle but ended up as a reflection on the use of murder - or the threat of murder - as a tactic. I'd post it on libcom but not sure where it should go - the news forum?

It would be very welcome to post it as a news article. Click submit content - news.

ChinaStudyGroup.net just relaunched. Please visit and leave comments - we want to focus more on interacting with other websites now. We've revamped the website and set it up on Wordpress as something like a group blog, and we've recruited a few new bloggers. The people posting on the site now range from lib-com to Maoist to social democrat, but we're all anti-capitalist and interested in understanding different perspectives on China - including Chinese perspectives. Our political diversity and our emphasis on translating and introducing Chinese anti-capitalist perspectives means there's a lot of stuff on the site that may put off anti-authoritarians - defences of Mao's legacy and so on - but if you dig around a little you'll find some interesting things, and of course feel free to criticize anything you disagree with. At this point we're looking for more stimulation.

Also feel free to repost anything from there, as long as you indicate the source, and we'll do likewise. (You'll notice libcom.org is on the CSG list of China news sites as well as on the personal lists of me and another blogger there.) And as I mentioned above, having more bloggers, most whom read and speak Chinese, and some of whom will be living in China, hopefully there will be more original news reports there in the coming months.