Joann Pittman is Vice President of Partnership and China Engagement and editor of ZGBriefs.
Prior to joining ChinaSource, Joann spent 28 years working in China, as an English teacher, language student, program director, and cross-cultural trainer for organizations and businesses engaged in China. She has also taught Chinese at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul (MN), and Chinese Culture and Communication at Wheaton College (IL) and Taylor University (IN).
Joann has a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Northwestern-St. Paul (MN), and an MA in teaching from the University of St. Thomas (MN).
She is the author of Survival Chinese Lessons and The Bells Are Not Silent: Stories of Church Bells in China.
Her personal blog, Outside-In can be found at joannpittman.com, where she writes on China, Minnesota, traveling, and issues related to "living well where you don't belong."
You can find her on Twitter @jkpittman.com and on Facebook at @authorjoannpittman.
She makes her home in New Brighton, Minnesota.
In the historical news department, the Catholic news service UCA recently wrote about the discovery of a gravesite in Henan Province that is believed to be a burial site of the Nestorians, the earliest Christians to reach China in the Tang Dynasty.
Let's call it "video week" at ZGB because my top picks this week are all video reports on some fairly pressing contemporary social issues, each of them ripples of China's one-child policy.
Thirty years ago, I set off for what I thought would be a one-year teaching stint in China. Twenty-eight years later, I moved back to the States. Either I'm really bad at math or that was one very long year.
These three articles caught my attention while compiling ZGBriefs this week.
This week's must-read stories from the editor of ZGBriefs
I recently ran across a post called "Pagan Practice in China's Shanxi Province," which included some intriguing photos of traditional customs.
Three stories caught our eye this week, two serious, and one that will make you want to don all of your winter clothes, grab your camera, and head to Harbin, China.
To come up with the list of the Top Ten Most Read articles on ChinaSource this year, we took the top five from the ChinaSource Quarterly and the top five from the ChinaSource Blog. Here they are:
Since it's the end of the year, we decided to jump on the "Top Posts" bandwagon that is careening through the blogosphere. However, since each ZGBriefs post includes dozens of stories, we are highlighting here the top ten most clicked links of the year in other words, your favorite stories.
What do Christmas, the one-child policy, and high end art collecting have in common? They are all subjects of the articles we selected as among the most interesting for this week.
Over the weekend there was another deadly attack in Xinjiang Province, in which 16 people were killed.
Top stories from this week's ZG Briefs