The Human Cost of China’s Economic Reforms

Mr Yu is worried that millions of workers the Chinese government plans to lay off from failing state owned companies will be “abandoned” like he says he was 15 years ago.

Media
03.26.15

Brother, Can You Spare a Renminbi?

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

Who deserves to be poor in modern China? One man in China’s southern Zhejiang province certainly seemed sympathetic: Each day, he pushed himself along the street on a homemade wooden skateboard, his apparently paralyzed legs tucked under his body...

Media
03.09.15

China’s Real Inconvenient Truth: Its Class Divide

Rachel Lu

China is talking about its pollution problem, but its equally serious class problem remains obscured behind the...

Viewpoint
08.05.14

Equal in Inequality?

Marc Blecher

For the past several months, readers around the world have been buying, discussing, and even occasionally reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty’s magisterial analysis of the relationship between...

Media
04.28.14

A Guide to Social Class in Modern China

Class is a sensitive word in China. Marxist-Leninist rhetoric like “class enemies,” “class conflict,” and “class struggle” are rarely seen in the country’s media these days, but since China began its market reforms in 1979, stratification has...

The NYRB China Archive
02.04.14

China’s Way to Happiness

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

Richard Madsen is one of the modern-day founders of the study of Chinese religion. A professor at the University of California San Diego, the seventy-three-year-old’s works include Morality and Power in a Chinese Village, China and...

Media
10.22.13

China’s Silly War on Starbucks Lattes

There are worse things in the world than an overpriced latte. That’s the message that thousands of Chinese web users are sending China Central Television (CCTV), a state-owned media behemoth that ran an October 20 segment...

Media
08.14.13

Don’t Dream Big—Four Vignettes on Social Mobility in Modern China

The New York Times recently ran an article that detailed the...

Media
01.23.13

A Map of Two Chinas

On Friday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that income inequality in the country exceeds a warning level set by the United Nations.

China’s...