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Sensual study of Chengdu’s underground club scene follows unselfconscious clubbers, performers and musicians through their neon-detailed nights
Ben Mullinkosson is a film-maker and skateboarder from Chicago who brings an effortless, freewheeling intimacy to this immersive and sensual study of the underground club scene in Chengdu in central China. The title is enigmatic, but it seems to refer to the imminent closure of a club called Funky Town where his subjects have been hanging out; the darkness is the club’s darkness, which is enfolding and welcoming and reassuring, a neon-detailed night in which nothing matters but youth, beauty and the pleasure of the moment.
Mullinkosson is utterly at home and embedded with his group of friends – clubbers, performers, musicians – with whom he hangs out while they (utterly unselfconsciously) get very drunk; and in fact the spectacle of people throwing up in the street becomes a bit of a motif. He isolates a very strange setpiece in which a young woman rocks back and forth in the foreground as a prelude to a gruesome vomiting episode while two people in the background chatter away, entirely unconcerned.

Please enter a valid email address. An increasing number of Asian American political leaders are denouncing San Francisco Mayor London Breed as locals continue to signal alarm over rising crime rates ...

A Chinese American family told NBC News that they will be donating $5 million to Black college students around the U.S., and it will be funded from the sale of their home in Coronado, Cali., which ...

The meetings showed China’s leader is steering China along a path that is dictated by national security and party control, at the expense of everything else
Xi Jinping didn’t speak at China’s Two Sessions meetings this year, but his presence was still felt.
His name appeared 16 times in the government work report delivered by the Premier Li Qiang, the number two leader, reportedly more than in any other year since Xi took office over a decade ago. Li was clear in noting that credit for China’s achievements in 2023 was owed to Xi and to “the sound guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, Xi’s .

After months of delay, Congress approved Cofa funding for north Pacific nations but Washington needs to show it can deliver for the wider region
A dysfunctional US Congress finally got its act together and approved a $7bn funding package for three Pacific nations. After years of negotiations and more recently, , Congress late Friday cleared the way for the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau to renew the Compacts of Free Association (Cofa) agreements that fund critical services for the next two decades, and keep open a special migration pathway to the US.
In return, the American military secures exclusive access to vast north Pacific territories and the unilateral use of strategically located military facilities – a bargain for the US in these contested times.
Dr Meg Keen is the director of the Pacific Islands program at the Lowy Institute. She is the former director of the Australia Pacific Security College and senior policy adviser to RAMSI.
Mihai Sora is a Research Fellow in the Pacific Islands Program and Project Director of the Aus-PNG Network.

Intelligence agencies say competitors are ‘challenging longstanding rules of the international system … and US primacy’
US intelligence agencies say the country faces an “increasingly fragile world order”, strained by great power competition, transnational challenges and regional conflicts, in a report released as agency leaders testified in the Senate.
“An ambitious but anxious , a confrontational , some regional powers, such as Iran, and more capable non-state actors are challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as US primacy within it,” the agencies say in their 2024 Annual Threat Assessment.

Chinese auto imports and EVs are a hot topic, especially in Washington, where a bipartisan effort has been made by both key Republican senators and the Democratic sitting President Joe Biden to ...

Countries are placing a higher priority on resilience and security in the wake of the pandemic and as tensions grow
In 2012, shortly before becoming China’s top leader, visited the Port of Los Angeles to discuss boosting trade. What then looked like a locus of cooperation has now become another site for suspicion as Sino-American relations remain tense. Last month, the Biden administration of funding for port infrastructure, much of it to replace cargo cranes that have almost all been made by a state-owned Chinese firm. The US is concerned because the sophisticated pieces of equipment manage information about containers and their contents, their origins and their destinations – and can be remotely programmed and controlled. It wants to of the cranes, which have not been made in the US for decades.
The move comes amid a much broader economic rethinking: what the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, last year as “a paradigm shift from the primacy of open markets to the primacy of security; from ‘just in time’ to ‘just in case’”. The pandemic was a wake-up call, forcing nations to scrutinise their supply chains, and ask whether they had sacrificed resilience for efficiency. The climate crisis is already affecting logistics: low rainfall in Panama has forced the authorities to limit vessels . Cyber-attacks by criminal actors are another concern. The Japanese port of Nagoya was put out of action by a ransomware attack last summer. But current conflicts and geopolitical divides are driving the changes.

Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country,” playing at Berkeley Rep, recalls Chinese Exclusion Act and its bitter aftermath.

A Black family rented their Coronado home to a Chinese American family when no one else would. Now, the Chinese American family is donating $5 million to Black San Diego State University students ...

A Chinese American family pays it forward by donating to Black college students’ education years after a Black couple kindly rented and sold property to them amid racially restrictive ...

Chinese American veterans who fought in World War II were honored in New Orleans with a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony.