Culture
In 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, Mao Zedong expanded China's nuclear weapons project into the country's first space program. Throughout the 1950s China cooperated with the Soviet Union, but after relations between the two countries declined in 1960, China began to work alone and to focus on missile defense systems. Though the program declined after Mao's death, China revived its space program after the end of the Cold War.
In the United States, most of us grow up studying tales and stories from Ancient Western civilizations like Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. The Middle East has a long history of literature that we should all spend some time learning about. Classical Arabic literature contains some of the w
Yuto, the youngest boy in the Yamagata family, got up earlier than usual. His elder sister, Aiko, was still sleeping. It was May 5, Kodomo no Hi (子供の日): Children’s Day in Japan.
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Dates have been a staple food in the Middle East for millennia. Paintings from long lost civilizations bear images of people harvesting dates. With such a long history, dates and date palms are firmly rooted in the cultures of the Middle East.
Many Westerners travelling in China are struck by the bizarre English phrases bannered across the t-shirts commonly worn by young Chinese people. The slogans sometimes seem ripped from the pages of English-language fashion magazines.
In the movie Beijing Bicycle (十七岁的单车) viewers will learn, among other things, the importance of having a bike in Chinese cities. But in a country changing so quickly, is this still the case?