Timothy Lesle

Last week, with June 4 marking the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on the student protests in Tiananmen Square, Chinese officials blocked filming around Tiananmen by physically blocking shots. Below, the experience of BBC’s Beijing correspondent.

Umbrellas are one of the things I remember from Korea, Japan and China. As a boy, I think I [...]

Roving China correspondent Josh Chin has filed a brief video report with the Wall Street Journal on Beijing’s growing transit system. It’s done well, and for being just a few minutes long, feels awfully comprehensive. My favorite is this Chinese kid who grew up in Switzerland and in documenting the entire subway system online.

The Asia Society’s Center on U.S.–China Relations recently published China Green, a multimedia site that will highlight stories of China’s environment. Its initial set of videos and images focus on how climate change is affecting the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas, which host the headwaters of most of Asia’s major rivers.

The Asia Society took [...]

A few days ago, the AP’s Daisy Nguyen published a report on the trend of building suburban-style developments around the world. Developers in China and India and Africa are looking to Southern California (pictured above, partially) for a growth model. While this should be alarming to anyone concerned about resources and climate change (and willing, [...]

Diane Dale and I encountered each other on the expo floor at Greenbuild last month. It was a Thursday afternoon, the 20th of November, and the conference was in full swing. We’d initially walked past each other without quite realizing it, but were soon standing together in the middle of one of the paths between [...]

Yesterday was the International Forum of the gigantic Greenbuild Conference in Boston. The organizers of the forum invited me to speak and sit on a panel about New Communities in a green design context. My role was to discuss my Frontline/World story on the Huangbaiyu Cradle to Cradle Village. There were about 350 people in [...]

Hao Zifu, retired miner, possibly former Red Guard. His working days were spent stooped in coal tunnels. At the end of the day, he had to lie on the ground to straighten his back. Hao Jiazhai, Shanxi Province, China.
He’s holding two cigarettes. One is for me.

Although the flooding is near completion–the last city to be inundated is going under this fall–the consequences of China’s Three Gorges Dam will shudder through generations.

But that’s a big story, and big stories are hard to tell well. One way is to find a character, a family, a community, and to show how [...]

Dwell Magazine’s October issue is out, and it includes an essay, entitled “Western Promises,” that I wrote about my reporting on the Huangbaiyu Cradle to Cradle Village project.  Huangbaiyu, a small village in northeast China, set to become a leading example of the power of green design in a country that desperately needs it. The [...]

I haven’t been watching the Olympics, mainly because the rabbit-ears on our television don’t pick up NBC. But if I were, I’m sure I’d be just as disappointed with NBC as everyone else seems to be–the tape delays, the incessant commentary. Since NBC is blocking international video feeds online, I can’t see any that way, [...]

I was surprised to hear that Li Ning was the final torch bearer at Beijing’s opening ceremonies. That’s him flying through the air, photographed by Xinhua. That Li should be the choice makes sense: after staying away from the Olympics for decades, China returned in 1984; then-19-year-old Li Ning left L.A. with six medals [...]

This morning, NASA and the Exploratorium webcast live from Xinjiang, China. You can watch their hour-long production at the Exploratorium’s Total Solar Eclipse web site. (That’s a photo from the Exploratorium blog above.)
The broadcast starts about 30 minutes before totality, when the moon completely blocks out the sun. The first fifteen minutes include a lesson [...]