This week, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced it would cease collecting data on youth unemployment. The news came...
Dear People’s Republic, Or should I call you, China? I am writing to you on the eve of your 70th birthday. 70, what an age. “For a man to live to 70 has been rare since ancient times,” the poet Du Fu wrote in the eighth century. You have outlived...
A close-up look at the Chinese generation born after 1990 exploring through personal encounters how young Chinese feel about everything from money and sex to their government, the West, and China’s shifting role in the world―not to mention their love affair with food, karaoke, and travel.
When I lived with Tom in the city of Chengdu in 2015 and into 2016, he was a 23-year-old probationary member of the Chinese Communist Party, on his way to joining the organization’s nearly 90 million full members. He wanted to embark on a career...
Over the past few seasons, logos have made a return to the runway. Even in China, where the industry consensus was that countless fakes and shallow status projection had created serious logo fatigue, people are no longer ashamed to flash luxury...
China’s ruling communist party is concerned that swathes of politically apathetic millennials, branded the ‘Zen-generation’, are sauntering through life in a passive and unpatriotic way - raising doubts about their loyalty to the Chinese...
In the spirit of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Bringing up Bébé, and The Smartest Kids in the World, Little Soldiers is a hard-hitting exploration of China’s widely acclaimed yet insular education system—held up as a model of academic and behavioral excellence—that raises important questions for the future of American parenting and education.
The Han Clothing Movement, a youth-based grassroots nationalist movement built around China’s majority Han ethnic group, has emerged over the past 15 years in urban China. It imagines the numerically and culturally dominant Han—nearly 92% of...
A group of high school students in Beijing has made a film about the life of a transgender boy in a bid to raise public awareness of the issue, local media reported. The 75-minute production, titled Flee, tells the story of Zhang Wangan, a...
Included in this Depth of Field column are stories of love, community, remembrance, and the future, told through the discerning eyes of some of China’s best photojournalists. Among them, the lives of African migrants in Guangzhou, seven years...
If China will rule the world one day, who will rule China? There are more than 320 million Chinese between the ages of 16 and 30. Children of the one-child policy, born after Mao, with no memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre, they are the first net native generation to come of age in a market-driven, more international China. Their experiences and aspirations were formed in a radically different country from the one that shaped their elders, and their lives will decide the future of their nation and its place in the world.
Anyone who’s spent any length of time following Western press coverage of China is familiar with the notion that China’s leaders are obligated to look tough in order to appease a rising nationalism. Much has been written about the...
Harvard and Peking University researchers just upended conventional wisdom.
In early December, Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered the country’s universities to “adhere to the correct political orientation.” Speaking at a conference on ideology and politics in China’s colleges, he stressed that schools must uphold the...
Alec Ash, a young British writer who lives in Beijing, has covered “left-behind” children in Chinese villages, the “...
Less than 6% of students in Beijing schools for migrant children entered college. In local public schools, 60% did
Nationwide crackdown includes three-year jail sentence for 15-year-old who robbed his classmates
Chinese millennials are conflicted between their national pride and their love for western brands
With 2017 nearing, it’s likely China will expand its campaign to further instill the ideologies of the party in young minds
With the end of the One-Child Policy, unregistered younger siblings are trying to make up for lost time
“We’ve chosen your children according to their physical attributes,” the leader told a group of parents at a Beijing public elementary school.
Having grown up in a booming economy, China's 7.5 million school leavers this year are intent on forging paths very different from their parents
In the process, I learned why Chinese millennials can't seem to unplug from the live-streaming craze.
Tech companies doing business in China might have to adjust operations to comply with proposed rules
Chinese children must endure years of stress and impossible expectations preparing for their final school exam
Han Han discusses his writings, the turns his life has taken and what people in the West fail to understand about China
At age 19, Mojia Shen knew where she came from, what she was expected to do, and she had worked hard to follow rules, fulfill everyone’s expectation, earn her marks and deliver results. Then came a surprise. When she got early admission...
Pictures of the baby-faced couple from Guangxi province in their wedding outfits went viral on social networks earlier this week.
It is no secret that Chinese students are pouring into the United States; over 300,000 of them attended U.S. colleges and universities in 2015 alone, and Chinese are filling up spots in U.S. secondary schools in search of a better...
The craze reflects a tendency toward flamboyant gestures—but also how high the stakes have become for the modern Chinese marriage.
According to data from the China Internet Network Center, in 2015, online trading in stocks and online payment were hot areas of growth.
“We really like American culture, but we also like to have a government that doesn’t show weakness abroad.”
Young Chinese don't like it when Americans see China as a monolith.
Splitting the bill is a relatively new idea to most Chinese, but now it's being embraced by cash-strapped young people.
Activists tie themselves up in chains, block mountain roads, scale fences and throw red paint balloons in a wave of anti-China sentiment to turn politics in the next election.
In 1989, students marched on Tiananmen Square demanding democratic reform. The Communist Party responded with a massacre, but it was jolted into restructuring the economy and overhauling the education of its young citizens. A generation later, Chinese youth are a world apart from those who converged at Tiananmen. Brought up with lofty expectations, they’ve been accustomed to unprecedented opportunities on the back of China’s economic boom. But today, China’s growth is slowing and its demographics rapidly shifting, with the boom years giving way to a painful hangover.
“It seems that Chinese men don’t want to marry a girl with tattoos,” complained one such girl on the Chinese online discussion platform Douban. She posted a picture of her body art, an...
In 1997, Beijing was smaller city, and Keep in Touch, Jamhouse, and Nightman were the hippest venues around. There was no traffic on the ring roads, and if you got tired of Chinese food you might take a trip to Fangzhuang to visit this Italian...
Beijing has approved the country's "football reform plan," and says being good at soccer is the "ardent wish of the whole nation."
One minute later, at precisely 11:45, the stillness was shattered. Thousands of teenagers swarmed out of the towering front gate of Maotanchang High School. Many of them wore identical black-and-white Windbreakers emblazoned with the slogan, in...
A working class high-school graduate who scored abysmally on China's college entrance exam, Mei now owns his own business, claims title to three-quarters of an acre of land, lives in a split-level house, and is married to an eighteen-year-old who...
Well educated and deeply committed to helping their fellow Chinese, Liu Jianshu and Zhao Sile are the kind of idealistic young people who pepper the story of China’s transformation over the past century as it searches for a modern identity.
China has a fixation on training elite champions in select sports and an education system that considers sports a luxury and not a priority.
A dream, in the truest sense, is a solo act. It can’t be created by committee or replicated en masse. Try as you might, you can’t compel your neighbor to conjure up the reverie that you envision. And therein lies the latent,...
The New York Times recently ran an article that detailed the...
A new study shows that the country's youth have an increasingly lukewarm attitude about democratic political systems. At a minimum, surveys like these bolster emerging Chinese public intellectuals who are...
This week, the ChinaFile Conversation is a call for reactions to an article about China's current generation gap, written by James Palmer, a Beijing-based historian,...
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...
Rock and roll—rebellious, individualistic, explosive—seems incongruent with modern Chinese society. But as the music has evolved from a Western import into something uniquely Chinese, it has shaped and been shaped by China’s unique system and its relationship with the outside world. Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll looks at the people and events that have created Chinese rock’s unique identity, and tracks the music’s long journey from the Mao years to present.
