Cambridge University Press: Tying together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths.
An eight-year-old Chinese pupil, dubbed "Ice Boy" by social media users after images emerged of him arriving at school with swollen hands and frost on his hair and eyebrows, has sparked renewed discussion online about child poverty.
Since China began its market reforms in the late 1970s, it has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty, slashing the rate from nearly 90% in 1981 to under 2%, as measured by the World Bank’s latest spending benchmark.
Central China’s Hunan province plans to encourage people living in poverty to work abroad to achieve its goal of poverty alleviation, according to Xinhua, citing information from the province’s poverty relief authorities.
If the Chinese government is serious about fostering a stable and harmonious society, it must address limits on social mobility before it’s too late
In October, several publications marked the 80th Anniversary of the Chinese Communists’ Long March. We have chosen two stories that revisited this event and that were standouts, visually. Elsewhere, photographers...
Corruption, red tape has led to most vulnerable citizens receiving little help
People from poverty-stricken communities are relocated to more developed urban areas as part of a wide-ranging plan to tackle poverty.
The State Council has released a plan for improving the quality of education in rural areas over the next five years—a move the cabinet says is aimed at improving the quality of teaching at primary and secondary schools in the country’s less-...
President Xi Jinping seeks to rally support for a "tough battle" against poverty and to speed up growth in the country's relatively underdeveloped ethnic regions.
A series of reports issued by China's National Audit Office highlights problems in 19 counties that have received funding from national poverty alleviation programs....
Frustrated by how little they earn, the ablest farmers have migrated to cities, hollowing out this rural district in the Chinese heartland.
Live in a city near China's coast, and in a capital. (Coal doesn't hurt.)
The income gap between the rich and poor in China has surpassed that of the U.S. and is among the widest in the world, a report showed, adding to the challenges for President Xi Jinping as growth slows.
Businessman makes plea in People's Daily for country to improve bad philanthropic record by investing in the poor.
In the district of Bao’an in Shenzhen, thousands of laborers live in a makeshift city of prefabricated dormitories beside the hulking, mile-long steel shell of what will soon be the city’s newest airline terminal.
The passing coal miners in remote Shaanxi Province took one look at our marooned Audi and walked on, leaving us stuck on the sleet-covered mountain road. As dusk fell, I managed to mingle with some young migrant workers, and trek with them...
The Chinese Communist Party wants you to clean your plate, and it’s not afraid to barge into the dining room and take matters into official hands if you don’t.
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...
China unveiled guidelines on its long-awaited income redistribution plan by saying it would boost income for the poor, tighten its grip on illegal income and ask state companies to contribute more profits to the government.
According to China's first official Gini coefficient figures in a decade, China today is more equal than in 2003.
The first rich-poor index for the past decade paints a far-from-rosy picture of what must be done to bridge the wealth gap.
Tong Peng spent six months discovering his bachelor’s degree was “worthless” before deciding to apply for a job as a street sweeper.
He graduated from college in Harbin in June, 2012, not expecting to find it so tough to find work with a...
The journalist who publicized the deaths of five young boys in southwestern China last week, has been forced to take a “vacation.”
In China, life is comfortable for the fortunate few. For others, it’s a hand-to-mouth struggle for a full stomach, a place to live, wages for work done, and freedom to speak openly. It’s a place where few things are more important than food; “Have you eaten yet?” is another way of saying hello. After traversing the country and meeting its people, Ang shares her delicious experiences with us. She tells of a clandestine cup of salty yak butter tea with a Tibetan monk during a military crackdown, and explains how a fluffy spring onion omelet encapsulates China’s drive for rural development.
In the intellectual ferment leading up to the 1989 Tiananmen protests, a much-watched series on Chinese television called River Elegy became closely identified with the hopes of China’s reformers. The six-...
Given China's goal to develop a harmonious society and to improve the competitiveness of its future workforce in order to overcome the challenges of an aging population and move toward a high-income society, there is an urgent need to identify...
