In a small Chinese town where unemployment has run high during the COVID-19 pandemic, the local government has embraced a surprising remedy to joblessness: public toilets. Fugong Village, in Guangdong province, usually sees nearly half of its...
Dexter Roberts explores the reality behind today’s financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered. He focuses on two places: the village of Binghuacun in Guizhou province, one of China’s poorest regions that sends the highest proportion of its youth away; and Dongguan, China’s most infamous factory town located in Guangdong, home to both the largest number of migrant workers and the country’s biggest manufacturing base.
Beijing shifts its attitude towards workers from the Philippines.
This dispatch of photojournalism from China cuts across a broad spectrum of society, from film screenings in Beijing for the visually impaired to an acrobatics school 200 miles south, in Puyang, Henan province, and from children in rural Sichuan...
At 14 years old, Wang Ying doesn’t want to be a mother. She scowls darkly as her younger brother and sister squabble in the corner while she does the housework. But she grudgingly cleans up after them and cooks them a potato stew...
China’s rise over the past several decades has lifted more than half of its population out of poverty and reshaped the global economy. What has caused this dramatic transformation? In China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation, author Bradley Gardner looks at one of the most important but least discussed forces pushing China’s economic development: the migration of more than 260 million people from their birthplaces to China’s most economically vibrant cities.
These withering findings on China’s reforms come from a startling place: from within the government itself.
This month, we feature galleries published in February that showcase photographers’ interest in China’s borders and its medical woes, the lives of its minorities and their traditions and customs, and—in the case of Dustin Shum’s...
Less than 6% of students in Beijing schools for migrant children entered college. In local public schools, 60% did
"They came and banged on tenants' doors every day until they agreed to move out, and they cut off their power supply for a week"
In this month’s Depth of Field, Chinese photojournalists explore foreign terrain, both beyond China’s borders and within them. Independent photographer Yuyang Liu traveled the open seas to document the lives of Chinese and African...
One of the most critical tasks is developing a workforce for the 21st century.
President Xi wants Guangdong to set an example in his goal of moving away from the cheap-labor export model to an innovation-and-consumption-based one.
The Chinese presence in Africa has been so sudden and so all-encompassing that it’s left a lot of people confused. Chinese farmers now compete for space and customers in Lusaka’s open-air markets, Chinese textiles are undercutting...
Xiong Di, this short film by Enric Ribes and Oriol Martínez, is a beautiful ode to friendship among young factory workers in China.
You can't ignore the lower-end demand because there is none at the higher end.
Every year tens of millions of Chinese migrant workers head home in the largest annual mass migration of people.
Fifteen minutes into almost any conversation about the Chinese in Africa, the question about Chinese labor invariably comes up. “The Chinese are exporting convicts to work on construction sites,” according to one of the pervasive myths, or, “...
Workers are also making more, National Bureau of Statistics says, and they are finding work closer to their rural homes.
Sociologist Ben Ross, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, focuses on Chinese labor migration and related issues. He first got noticed by Sinica in 2007 while writing...
This photo series of Chinese hairdressers was made in the spring of 2012, in the city center of Chengdu in Sichuan province. There, some 16 percent of the city’s...
Chinese municipal governments must widen unemployment benefits to residents who are not registered locally, China said on Wednesday, as it dismantles hurdles to urbanization efforts by easing conditions for migrant workers.
China says 95% of its 1.34 billion people are covered by medical insurance. That should have included Zhao Guomei, whose struggle with a rare but treatable disease shows how the system is failing for millions of China’s workers.
China's migrant population may get equal access to more public services formerly restricted to the locals, according to a draft document of the government.
Laden with beer, liquor, soft drinks and snacks, the trucks are on their way to restock the thousands of Chinese-run corner shops and convenience stores that dot the Spanish capital. Business is good. It always has been, even in the worst moments...
Kaiser and Jeremy are joined this week by Mara Hvistendahl, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author and long-standing resident of Shanghai, to discuss her two main works. Along with discussing the twists and turns of her murder novel, ...
In early May, China’s premier, Li Keqiang, made a trip to Africa that raised a central question about China’s rise: What effect will it have on the world’s poorer countries? As a big third-world country that has lifted hundreds of millions out of...
China may be sincere in its belief that its engagement in Africa is not neo-colonial or imperial in nature but author Howard French argues that may be what ultimately happens if Beijing continues on its current path. In his provocative new book...
A generation of Chinese people from rural areas who moved to the big cities to find work is reaching retirement age, but many are finding they have been left outside the country's urban pension system despite extensive reforms in recent years....
This report recommends that China curb rapid urban sprawl by reforming land requisition, give migrants urban residency and equal access to basic public services, and reform local finances by finding stable revenues and by allowing local...
This includes an estimated increase of 100,000 senior citizens every year until 2020.
About 61 Million Chinese Kids Haven’t Seen One or Both Parents for at Least Three Months
Every morning outside the imposing gate of the Beijing Film Studio, a throng gathers to try to find a way inside. These aren’t fans, exactly. Look at their faces, the practiced way they crane their necks or square their shoulders when the man...
A one-and-a-half-year-old girl wraps her arms around her mother’s neck, crying. Her mother, handcuffed, cannot hug her back—she can only squat down beside the police car to match her daughter’s height. “I’m sorry, mommy can’t hold you…”
On...
Women are crucial to China’s manufacturing sector. While women comprise more than 44% of the overall workforce, they represent about 60% of workers who migrate from rural areas to cities to work in factories. These female workers are diverse,...
Tucked amidst the factories and shops of of the Longgang district of the southern boomtown of Shenzhen sits a handful of narrow Qing Dynasty lanes collectively called Wuwucun, after the original Hakka minority Wu clan who established the village...
In 2011, Liu Jie, a Chinese photographer based in Beijing, visited and photographed more than 20 villages in the Chinese countryside, documenting one of the more silent but equally poignant externalities of the Chinese economic miracle: the...
The evening sun sits low in the smoggy Beijing sky. Beneath a staid, maroon apartment block, Jiang Ying, 24, is stirring from her bed after having slept through the day. Day is night and night is day anyway in the window-less world she inhabits...
The recent devastating floodwaters that hit China’s capital ten days ago may have receded, but thousands of residents who dwell in Beijing’s basement tenements–many migrant workers with few other options in the expensive capital–have been left...
As the gap between China’s urban and rural economies continues to expand, the largest rural-urban migration in world history persists. When those from the countryside arrive in the city, the current hukou system blocks their access to the social...
Every year over 200 million peasants flock to China’s urban centers, providing a profusion of cheap labor that helps fuel the country’s staggering economic growth. Award-winning journalist Michelle Dammon Loyalka follows the trials and triumphs of eight such migrants—including a vegetable vendor, an itinerant knife sharpener, a free-spirited recycler, and a cash-strapped mother—offering an inside look at the pain, self-sacrifice, and uncertainty underlying China’s dramatic national transformation.
We hurriedly cleaned up the studio and tried to set a bit more of a romantic tone this week, a feat accomplished mostly by positioning small candles and trays of potpourri by the microphones. And why else than because our subject today is sex and...
