[Note: I wrote this many months ago while in Beijing.] Living in China has made me interested about China's history and current events, mainly as a way to make sense of the things I see around me and to fit our experiences into a greater China context.

During our short time here, I've been lucky enough to find three fantastic information sources that put out a lot of great China information. There are many resources available, but these three are made by Westerners and are truly top-notch.

1: Learning about the past

The only way to make sense of many Chinese activities and habits is to put them in their proper context. If you view these things through the lens of contemporary American education and American values, China seems like a bizarre world indeed. In fact, much of our first year and many of our early blog posts were triggered by, and talk about, the frustration caused by the disconnect between normal American behavior and normal Chinese behavior.

However, if you view Chinese activities and behaviors within their proper context, they make a lot of sense. But how to bridge this gap of American education and Chinese culture and history? Enter the China History Podcast.

Laszlo Montgomery puts on a truly wonderful podcast that takes 5,000 years of Chinese history, dissects it into bite-sized chunks, and makes it easily understandable for people with zero China experience. Via his podcast I have listened to Laszlo speak for countless hours, and I can only say that the amount I have learned from him is truly mind-blowing.

In my opinion they are all good, but his crème de la crème are:

The Cultural Revolution (8 part series)
Deng Xiaoping (8 part series)
The History of Hong Kong (7 part series)
China and Japan 1895 - 1945
Daoism (3 part series)

You can tell that I find the more recent history (approximately 200 years ago and newer) more relevant than ancient Chinese history. However, I'm frequently surprised at how many ancient references and sayings pop up in daily conversation.

The China History Podcast is updated quite regulary, and seems to release a new episode every 10 days on average. Even more convenient, if you subscribe via iTunes, they are automatically downloaded for you whenever a new episode is published.

2: Staying current with the news

One thing I discovered when I first began trying to follow China current events (from within China) is that it's not so easy. Our VPN (the system that allows us to access sites blocked within China) became extremely unreliable and we finally just gave up trying to keep it working.

If you cannot read Chinese characters, and you cannot access English-language China news outlets outside China ¹, then your options become extremely limited. Most of the English-language news outlets produced inside China are more propaganda than news, and topics deemed sensitve by the government are often barely mentioned or not covered at all. As a foreigner, the sensitive topics are the ones that I am most interested in reading about.

About a year ago I saw a reference to Bill Bishop's excellent Sinocism newsletter. This email newsletter comes out daily and provides a summary of the day's events in and around China. The resources he uses to pull together his links are quite varied, and covers a mix of Chinese mainland and foreign reporting.

The newsletter is split into several categories (such as Politics and Law, Business and Economy, and Foreign and Defense Affairs), so you can quickly jump to the areas that are most interesting to you.

3: Staying current with the culture

The Sinocism newsletter gives a good summary of daily news, but it doesn't provide insight into how current events impact Chinese society and culture. To do that, you need to talk to many smart, well-connected people within China, or, listen to other people do it. This is where the Sinica podcast comes to the rescue.

The podcast is moderated by two regular hosts: Kaiser Kuo (pronounced "Go-ah" and Jeremy Goldkorn, and features different knowledable guests each show. The pair of hosts have completely different personalities but they complement each other well. One thing I like about the show is that they often dig into taboo or sensitive topics, which are areas that are very difficult to learn about by talking to local Chinese friends.

Similar to the China History Podcast, if you subscribe via iTunes, the shows are automatically downloaded for you whenever a new episode is published. A small annoyance is that Sinica is part of the Popup Chinese group of podcasts. Frankly, I simply delete the other Popup Chinese episodes and only keep the Sinica shows.

To be fair, we can access many international news sites (with limited censoring) and only some of the major ones are blocked completely by the Great Firewall. The problem with the major U.S. news outlets is that there is not much coverage of current affairs that are internal to China. Unless it's a political scandal, environmental catastrophe, or something so bizarre that's it's funny, China news is typically ignored. ↩