U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said, “It’s tragically fitting that we’re talking at the beginning of Holy Week because this is going to be the hardest and saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly.”
I had been thinking about the…

Meditation on Holy Week in the Midst of a Pandemic

Since totalitarian movements exist in a world which itself is nontotalitarian, they are forced to resort to what we commonly regard as propaganda.
U.S. Intelligence reports that China has misrepresented the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.…

The Dragon’s Deception: Conspiracy Theories and False Numbers

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has spread throughout the world with the number of cases increasing daily, both due to spread and to extended testing. We have provided links to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s websites that…

Coronavirus: Explanations and Ethical Issues

As the world reels amid the COVID-19 (formerly, coronavirus) pandemic, the government of China wants us to know that 1) the virus didn’t originate in China and 2) President Xi stopped it in its tracks. And that we should all be thankful to him.
The…

China: Rewriting the History of COVID-19

Students and employees in China, like many across the globe, are adjusting to learning or working from home under quarantine in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the app that the Chinese school system is using has angered many…

DingTalk: Where the “Teacher” Really Is Always Watching You

I wrote two articles for Mind Matters on China’s censorship and surveillance practices amidst the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak (here and here). After writing these articles, I had several people ask me about the coronavirus and whether I was…

The 2019 Coronavirus Spread More Than I Thought It Would

Could "Brains-in-a-Dish" Become Self-Aware?
Cerebral organoids made Discover magazine’s list of top science stories in 2019.1 First discovered in 2013, cerebral organoids, dubbed “mini-brains” or “brains-in-a-dish,” made the headlines because two…

Mindless Attempts

New documents known as the Karakax List, leaked by Uyghur journalists, reveal how the government of China determines who will be sent to one of the country’s detention camps in the Xinjiang province (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). For…

China: Sophisticated Surveillance Decides Who Gets Sent to Uyghur Camps

Journalist Angela Chen recounts a story that sums up the information problem many Chinese citizens face with respect to the cornavirus outbreak:
When Linda logged in to the Chinese social network Weibo on Monday, she saw a curious post from the…

Coronavirus in a World Without Trust

When coronavirus (2019-nCoV) first broke out, the Chinese government responded by quarantining journalists, citizen, and doctors who said “SARS is back”—or said anything at all about the pneumonia-like virus online. China downplayed the virus to the…

Censorship? But Coronavirus Doesn’t Care!

Article ID: JAR3412 | By: Heather Zeiger
Love Thy Body
Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality
by Nancy R. Pearcey
(Baker, 2018)
This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 41, number 2 (2018). For further…

Broken Hearts, Broken Bodies a book review of Love Thy Body Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality by Nancy R. Pearcey

Taiwan’s recent presidential election (January 11, 2020) featured the largest voter turnout in its history as a democracy. Incumbent Tsai Ing-wen (right, courtesy 蔡英文官方元首肖像照), a pro-democracy progressive gained a clear victory. Tsai supported the…

Can a Totalitarian State Be an Information Society?

In China, 2019 was a bad year for media freedom. The 2019 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters without Borders ranked China 177 out of 180 countries, ahead of Eritrea, North Korea, and Turkmenistan.
The Committee to Protect Journalists…

Serious Media In China Have Gone Strangely Silent

Six months ago I started writing on China and technology for Mind Matters. This has been a learning experience for me. I had to become familiar with the history of modern China so I could write about current events and analyze news articles in light…

Writing About China’s Relationship with Central Asia

According to a recent article in the New York Times, the city of Tumxuk in Xinjiang in western China, is the lab for better DNA phenotyping technology. DNA phenotyping was first developed in the United States for forensic identification. But many…

China: DNA Phenotyping Profiles Racial Minorities

China is providing several Central Asian former Soviet bloc countries surveillance technology for free. But as we have seen there is always a cost to doing business with China. In this case, the cost is that the data gleaned from these technologies…

Why China Leans Hard on Central Asia

What drives the Hong Kong protesters? Fear. They dread 2047 when Hong Kong comes completely under the jurisdiction of the Communist Party and is subject to the CCP’s rule of law rather than Hong Kong’s own laws under the current “one country, two…

Hong Kong: The Dread That Lies Ahead

Words have power. Whoever controls the narrative controls public perception. The Chinese government knows this, which is why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has historically censored the material Chinese citizens read, particularly about topics…

Tiananmen Square 30 Years On: Words Still Have Power

For my Biohazards column in Salvo Issue 50, I decided to write about vaccines since it was a hot news topic. I’m sure you’re asking the same thing I was asking about three days before the article’s deadline, “Why, Heather, did you decide to write…