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明年再见！
This will be our final issue for the year. We have lots of exciting new things coming in the new year, from a website revamp, to new events, to new products (you are going to love these!), to our leadership development program. 2015 简直 is going to be a great year! This is also your last chance to make a donation to us in 2014, so please take one minute to donate via this link. If you have been putting it off and putting it off, well, now is the time to finally do it! If for no other reason, do it because Santa is watching.
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Weekly Readings
President Xi Jinping has presided over a sea change in Chinese diplomacy and has pushed his "China Dream" onto the bureaucratic agenda through adroit use of forcing events. No longer abiding by Deng Xiaoping's "Bide and Hide," Xi is reformulating the principles and direction of China's foreign policy through the Party Congress plenary sessions and as many Central Foreign Affairs Work Conferences as came before. As Xi makes China's interests and future trajectory more clear, Washington's chosen course of shaping China's rise and demonstrating good intent by accommodating what it considers Beijing's legitimate interests may simply be overtaken by events. This week's readings are two overlapping U.S. analyses and three Chinese explanations of what Xi is doing to China's diplomatic posture.
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 Weibo Watch
Trending this week on Weibo is the Meipai discussion page (#美拍#), where users are sharing their ten-second movies created with the Meipai app. Meipai is like a tricked-out version of Vine. User can add music, special effects, and filters to their videos, then share them with other Meipai users and on third-party platforms such as Weibo. Check out the discussion page to see MVs (music videos) of babies, vacations, dogs, and more. There's even a Voice of Meipai (美拍好声音) contest! http://www.weibo.com/p/100808fa5c5b2c952c1e810c6b9efc357ba30d
Bonus: One of Meipai's top videos for the day is a robot dance: http://www.meipai.com/media/202487297
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Top 10 Words of 2014
In place our our usual "俗语 in Xi Jinping's Speeches" feature, since it is the end of the year we want to highlight the words of the year. People's Daily did a feature called 2014年度十大流行语出炉. It includes such key words as 打虎拍蝇, 顶层设计, 新常态, 断舍离 and of course 你懂的. It is a fun, brief, and accessible read.
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 Documentary of the Week
This week's documentary discusses a telephone and QQ scam that afflicated numerous Chinese people in the last year. The scam resulted in the loss of 25,000+ RMB (roughly $4000), which is under the annual family income for Shanghai but double that for Gansu. The show demonstrates some of the truth behind Beijing's complaints that its citizens also suffer from cybercrime. Some of the approaches would be familiar to anyone with an email address for a few years, while others demonstrate a degree of surveillance to tailor the scam to the target. This episode of 真实第25小时 highlights one set of challenges for an informatizing (信息化) but unequal society.
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If you appreciate the effort we put into organizing Chinese-language policy events, providing robust language and policy resources on our website, and the kind of content you see in this newsletter, please consider supporting us with a tax-deductible contribution--every bit helps! The American Mandarin Society is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
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