‘Survival Comes First’
from China Media ProjectGeneration Z has now become the primary force among China’s growing ranks of China’s online content moderators, who number in the tens of thousands. Their physical stamina means they generally fare better with the intense demands of the job and...
‘What Happened, Mama? In 1989, Were You Just Like Me?’
Two things motivated me to come to the U.S. for college in 2021. I believed in the fourth estate and wanted to become an investigative journalist, and I knew China had no space for speaking truth to power. I also wanted to run away from my family...
Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival
Every morning, I crossed a stretch of railway tracks on the way to my school. The tracks lay less than a hundred meters from the school gate, and a train often appeared in the late afternoon just as we were discharged. Sometimes it was a freight...
Is China’s Cultural Outreach to Muslims in Indonesia Working?
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. So as Beijing ramps up its engagement with the Global South and with the Muslim world, it is unsurprising that it has been reaching out to various Muslim organizations and strengthening...
Can China’s Scholarships and Cultural Diplomacy Efforts Succeed in Pakistan?
In Washington, D.C., China has a bad reputation for the way it treats its Muslim minorities. But views differ greatly in many majority-Muslim countries in Asia. Educational programs and exchanges are a key part of this. Pakistan is an exemplar:...
“The Police’s Strength Is Limited, but the People’s Strength Is Boundless”
The Committee that Ended the Age of Engagement?
The U.S. Congress’ special China committee has a packed agenda for the few months left this term. But its most consequential work may be done: a more confrontational U.S. policy towards China. The Select Committee on the Strategic Competition...
Xinjiang Authorities Are Retroactively Applying Laws to Prosecute Religious Leaders as Criminals
from Foreign Policy
“There Is No CPEC in Gwadar, Except Security Check Posts”
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is one of the major spokes of Beijing’s multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious attempt to remake global trade and transport infrastructure. CPEC’s terminus is Gwadar, a port...
For Beijing, Putting People Back to Work May Prove a Tough Job
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...
Investing in Tourism in Xinjiang, Beijing Seeks New Ways to Control the Region’s Culture
In a county where authorities ran multiple internment camps in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, the local government has commissioned a new set of buildings for a very different demographic: tourists. These sites and services, which were...
Elections? No Thank You. Performance Reviews? Maybe.
In What Purport to be Lifestyle Videos, Uyghur Influencers Promote Beijing’s Narrative on Their Homeland
For the past few years, Uyghur and other young members of ethnic minority groups from Xinjiang have been creating videos like Anniguli’s in which they appear to display details of their personal lives while simultaneously evincing support for the...
Public Security Minister’s Speech Describes Xi Jinping’s Direction of Mass Detentions in Xinjiang
Arrest Data Show National Security Law Has Dealt a Hard Blow to Free Expression in Hong Kong
A Vast Network of ‘New Era Civilization Practice Centers’ Is Beijing’s Latest Bid to Reclaim Hearts and Minds
New Data Show Hong Kong’s National Security Arrests Follow a Pattern
‘Because There Were Cameras, I Didn’t Ask Any Questions’
‘My Epitaph Only Needs One Phrase: He Spoke up Once for People.’
Translator’s Introduction
On February 7, the day Li Wenliang died from coronavirus, a piece of...
American Company Sold DNA Analysis Equipment to Security Officials in Xinjiang, Documents Show
In 2015, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau announced it planned to purchase equipment from the U.S.-based biotechnology company Promega for the purpose of analyzing DNA and adding it to a national database,...
Human Resources Both Drive and Limit China’s Push for Automation
from New America
Which European Companies Are Working in Xinjiang?
Foreign companies continue to conduct business in Xinjiang despite widespread evidence of human rights abuse. This list identifies 68 European companies with ties to Xinjiang ranging from building infrastructure and investing in joint ventures to...
Where Did the One Million Figure for Detentions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From?
As journalists and scholars have reported in recent months on the campaign of religious and cultural repression and incarceration taking place in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a central question has emerged: How many people has China’s...
Beijing’s Long Struggle to Control Xinjiang’s Mineral Wealth
The Silk Road Economic Belt—the overland component of Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—promises to bind China to Central Asia and beyond through a new infrastructural network. Connecting through China’s far western Xinjiang...
Here Are the Fortune 500 Companies Doing Business in Xinjiang
News reports from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang have described alarming, widespread, and worsening violations of the human rights of its predominantly Muslim, ethnically Turkic inhabitants, primarily the region’s approximately 11 million...
What Satellite Images Can Show Us about ‘Re-education’ Camps in Xinjiang
Claims that “re-education” camps are merely vocational training centers seem even less credible after one looks at the work of Shawn Zhang. A law student focusing on jurisprudence at the University of British Columbia in Canada, in May Zhang...
Central and Regional Leadership for Xinjiang Policy in Xi’s Second Term
from China Leadership MonitorAfter the 19th Party Congress last fall and the recent “two meetings” in March, the Party-state has now completed its quinquennial leadership turnover and announced a major restructuring of a number of Party and state entities. This institutional...
A Most Immoral Woman: George E. Morrison's Life in Turn-of-the-Century China
My historical novel “A Most Immoral Woman” tells the story of Morrison’s passionate and unconventional affair with Mae Perkins, an independent and wealthy young American libertine, in 1904. It’s a tale that roams the landscape of a dynasty in...
Pickup Artists with Chinese Characteristics
“If you don’t teach her a lesson, someone else will,” Fei explained during his two-hour “Sexual Assertiveness” session, concluding a week-long tutorial offered by Puamap, a team of “professional” seduction artists, marketers, and makeover men....
China is Driving a Boom in Brazilian Mining, but at What Cost?
In the middle of northern Brazil’s Amazon jungle, Chinese-made digging equipment rasps at the bottom of a giant iron ore mine. Here in the municipality of Canaã dos Carajás in the Serra dos Carajás in Brazil’s Pará state, some 1,...
Why’s Beijing So Worried About Western Values Infecting China’s Youth?
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...
How Do You Stand up to China? Ask Mongolia
The day before the Dalai Lama’s November 18 trip to Mongolia, Beijing issued a “strong demand” to its neighbor to cancel the visit...
Chinese and American City-Dwellers Differ on Trump Win
City-dwellers in China and the United States are among the greatest beneficiaries of the international trade deals President-elect Trump...
For Chinese Orphan with a Disability, Life in the U.S. Brought the Strength to Help a Friend Left Behind
According to my caretakers at the orphanage, Chunchun arrived a few years before I did, when she was a baby. They estimate that I was around three or four years old at the time of my arrival, howling and screaming at the top of my...
Watching A Chinese Professor Watching American Democracy
On the morning of Election Day, I joined He Haibo, a legal scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, as he spent several hours observing a polling station in the upscale Graham and Parks public elementary school in Cambridge,...
Why Newly Elected Hong Kong Legislators Cursed and Protested—At Their Own Swearing-In
There’s a bit of a nanny state in the city of Hong Kong. The government is quick to issue advice and admonitions about all matter of hazards—high ocean waves, food waste...
China’s Teflon Toxin Problem
from InterceptSince the late 1970s, the chemical industry has been at the heart of China’s dazzling growth. And as regulations increase around the world, many toxic chemicals wind up coming to China just to die a slow death. Teflon—the slippery substance used...
Drinking the Northwest Wind
Like so many of Mao’s pronouncements, it sounded simple. “The South has a lot of water; the North lacks water. So if it can be done, borrowing a little...
A Thousand Yes-Men Cannot Equal One Honest Advisor
Several cadre leaders have been punished for breaking the law, and nearly all of them have said: There isn’t enough internal supervision and no one warned me; if there’d been someone there whispering in my ear, I wouldn’t have committed such...
Sino-Russian Trade After a Year of Sanctions
from Carnegie Moscow CenterAfter a year of intense flirtation, the Sino-Russian relationship is beginning to look like a one-sided love affair. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to China last week—his first since the United States and...