Media
06.02.15

Top Chinese Authors Show Up at Book Expo, but Where Are the Readers?

Zhang Xiaoran

Last week, 20,000 publishers convened in New York’s Javits Center for BookExpo America (BEA), the...

Media
06.02.15

Chinese Netizens to Fiorina: You’re Right, We Don’t Innovate

David Wertime

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a declared Republican candidate for U.S. president, evidently has strong opinions about the capacities of Chinese people. “Yeah, the Chinese can take a test,” Fiorina told an Iowa-based video...

Media
05.29.15

Is the Shanghai Stock Market Bubble Finally Bursting?

David Wertime

A customer strolls into a bookstore, goes the popular Chinese...

Media
05.20.15

China Liked TPP—Until U.S. Officials Opened Their Mouths

After a brief but frightening setback for proponents, U.S. congressional leaders looked set on May 13 to pass...

Media
05.11.15

Interactive Map: Follow the Roads, Railways, and Pipelines on China’s New Silk Road

Reid Standish & Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

Foreign Policy has put together an interactive guide tracking Beijing’s victories and obstacles along the new Silk Road. The list of participating countries is still not finalized, but with China forking out billions in trade deals and...

Media
05.06.15

Online Reaction to Baltimore Protests Reveals Much About Chinese Tension with African Immigrants

Viola Rothschild

Several days ago, a Chinese friend and I were discussing the protests in Baltimore that erupted in response to the death of...

Media
04.30.15

Will China Ban Katy Perry?

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

On April 28, American pop singer Katy Perry gave her first-ever concert in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, the self-governing island which mainland China considers to be its sovereign territory. Tense relations between Taiwan and mainland China...

Media
04.28.15

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Chinese Fugitives

Alexa Olesen

Meet China’s 100 international most-wanted: a history professor, a driving instructor, and a government propaganda office cashier. Chinese graft-busters want you to know that one of them might be your neighbor.

On April 22, China’s dreaded...

Media
04.21.15

This Chart Explains Everything You Need to Know About Chinese Internet Censorship

David Wertime

What goes through a Chinese web user’s head the moment before he or she hits the “publish” button? Pundits, scholars, and everyday netizens have spent years trying to parse the (ever-shifting) rules of the Chinese Internet. Although Chinese...

Media
04.15.15

Online Support–and Mockery–Await Chinese Feminists After Release

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

On April 13, Chinese authorities released on bail five feminist activists detained for over a month without formal charges...

Media
04.14.15

Henry Paulson: ‘Dealing with China’

Eric Fish
from Asia Blog

Speaking at Asia Society New York on April 13 with New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson explained that it’s...

Media
04.13.15

The Chinese Internet Hates Hillary Clinton Even More than Republicans Do

Isaac Stone Fish

On the afternoon of April 12, Hillary Clinton announced her long-expected decision to run for president in 2016. Within hours, Chinese news sites shared the...

Media
04.02.15

‘Obama Is Sitting Alone at a Bar Drinking a Consolation Beer’

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

Danish and Chinese netizens have just shared in a collective guffaw at America’s expense. The online lampoonery came after Denmark...

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
03.25.15

Was Lee Kuan Yew an Inspiration or a Race Traitor? Chinese Can’t Agree

Rachel Lu

When Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, passed away at the ripe age of 91 on March 23, the elderly statesman was as controversial in death as in life—and...

Media
03.20.15

China Has Its Own Anti-Vaxxers—Blame the Internet

Alexa Olesen

While health officials in the United States and parts of Europe wrestle with a growing anti-vaccination, or “anti-vaxxer” movement, China is dealing with a less organized but similarly serious fear of immunizations. Social media reveals traces of...

Media
03.10.15

China’s Good Girls Want Tattoos

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

“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...

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...

Media
03.04.15

The Other China

Michael Meyer & Ian Buruma
Writers Michael Meyer and Ian Buruma engage in a discussion co-sponsored by The New York Review of Books centered on Meyer’s new book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, which combines immersion...
Media
03.03.15

The Word That Broke the Chinese Internet

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

It might be gibberish, but it’s also a sign of the times. The word duang, pronounced “dwong,” is spreading like wildfire throughout China’s active Internet—even though 1.3 billion Chinese people still haven’t figured out what it means....

Media
02.23.15

Five Predictions for Chinese Censorship in the Year of the Sheep

Blocked websites, jailed journalists, and nationalist rhetoric have long been features of the Chinese Communist Party’s media control strategy. During the Year of the Horse, which just ended on China’s lunar calendar, President Xi Jinping and his...

Media
02.19.15

Why 700 Million People Keep Watching the Chinese New Year Gala, Even Though It’s Terrible

Rachel Lu

The Chinese New Year Gala, which aired live on February 18 on Chinese Central Television (CCTV), is a four-and-half hour variety show with song and dance, comedic skits, magic tricks, acrobatic acts, and celebrity cameos. The show celebrates the...

Media
02.10.15

Chinese Corruption, Now Officially Hilarious

Rachel Lu

Corruption is finally funny—at least, according to the Chinese Communist Party. That’s because comedic performances in the upcoming February 18 performance of China’s annual New Year Gala, a variety show on China Central Television (CCTV)...

Media
02.05.15

Why Chinese Promote Confining New Mothers for a Month

Rachel Lu

HONG KONG—Giving birth is never easy, but for new Chinese mothers the month following a baby’s arrival is particularly fraught. Immediately after I became pregnant for the first time, I started to hear about zuoyuezi, or “sitting the...

Media
01.22.15

Xi Jinping’s Pay Raise

Alexa Olesen

It just got slightly less difficult to be a clean Chinese official. State media reported on January 20 that Chinese civil servants had received their first pay raise...

Media
01.13.15

This Culture Has Not Yet Been Rated

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

It all started with plunging necklines. After the sudden withdrawal and subsequent sanitizing of a popular Chinese show, viewers in China have renewed longstanding calls to strip government censors of their power, using one simple solution: a...

Media
01.13.15

‘Where’s Our Unity March?’ China Wants to Know

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian & Rachel Lu

The January 7 terrorist attack on satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 dead has mostly inspired unity in the West, but the massive march held in its aftermath is spurring controversy, and even some disdain, in China....

Media
01.08.15

What Will Happen to Uber in China?

Ride-sharing app Uber has expanded around the world at a blistering pace, launching in a new city every one or two days. At first glance, China...

Media
12.18.14

Hong Kong, the Resilient City

David Wertime

The tents have folded. After 75 days of camping on the street, braving police crackdowns, occasional civilian attacks, and the city’s (admittedly mild) winter chill, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters have cleared out. As promised, police...

Media
12.08.14

Happy Friday, Zhou Yongkang

Alexa Olesen

Eight minutes after midnight on Friday, the axe fell on Zhou Yongkang: a terse news release from state-run Xinhua news agency said that China’s former...

Media
12.08.14

On First Annual Constitution Day, China’s Most Censored Word Was ‘Constitution’

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

On December 4, China’s first annual Constitution Day, Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily posted the complete text of the Chinese...

Media
12.05.14

Repeat After Me: Taiwan’s Recent Elections Had Nothing to Do With Hong Kong

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

If China was in fact the invisible candidate in Taiwan’s local elections, it just lost in a...

Media
11.20.14

The Invisible Candidate in Taiwan’s Elections

Almost 80 percent of Taiwan, an island of 23 million off the coast of China, is expected to head to the polls November 29 to vote in local elections with more than 11,000 seats up for grabs. Voters will choose candidates ranging from mayors in...

Media
11.14.14

Why Is Beijing Downplaying the Supposedly Huge Climate Change Deal?

Alexa Olesen

The United States has been using some frothy language to describe its joint statement with China on forestalling climate change. In a breathless New York Times editorial, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry...

Media
11.12.14

“Having a Second Kid Isn’t as Simple as Adding Another Pair of Chopsticks”

Alexa Olesen

When China loosened its family planning rules a year ago in November, allowing more couples to have a second...

Media
11.05.14

Tim Cook Coming Out Has Turned China Into a Nation of Fifth-Graders

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

"Let me be clear," wrote Apple CEO Tim Cook in a Bloomberg Businessweek article published on October 30. "I'm proud to be gay."...

Media
10.29.14

Foot Spas, Steamed Buns, and Midday Drinking

It may not be Monty Python’s famous “Ministry of Silly Walks,” but it’s close.

The Office of Forbidding Midday Alcohol Consumption, a local...

Media
10.29.14

A Talking Heads Video: China Strikes Back

Orville Schell

In the first episode of the new VICE News series Talking Heads, Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China...

Media
10.27.14

What China’s Reading: ‘Broken Dreams, USA’

Zhou Xiaoping, a 33-year-old selfie-snapping blogger, has quickly become the new face of Chinese patriotism—or, some would say, nationalism. On October 15, Chinese President Xi Jinping...

Media
10.24.14

Hong Kong Documentary Explores the Roots of Dissent

La Frances Hui

To many observers, Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Movement”—thousands of students and other citizens in the streets demanding to choose their own political leaders—seemed to unfurl, fully formed, out of nowhere. Residents of the former colony were...

Media
10.23.14

Pandas Were Monsters

Alexa Olesen

"Rich Chinese are literally eating this exotic mammal into extinction," read a recent Global Post expose of the devastating trade in the pangolin, a scaly anteater that Chinese consider a delicacy. According to the Post, the...

Media
10.23.14

Kenny G: The Newest ‘Foreign Force’ in Hong Kong

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

As pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong extend into their fourth week with no resolution in sight, pro-Beijing voices have increasingly...

Media
10.21.14

Chinese Doubt Their Own Soft Power Venture

On September 27, Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong read aloud a letter written by President Xi Jinping at a ceremony in Beijing celebrating the tenth...

Media
10.15.14

Jiang Zemin Unplugged

Given the leadership styles of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, who have been China’s supreme leaders over the past twelve years, it is an almost shocking experience to look back at these two videos (the first of which circulated last week on social...

Media
10.10.14

China Bans Law-Breaking Actors From Movies and Television

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

Amid an ongoing government campaign against drugs, prostitution, and other moral vices, a powerful government agency has reportedly issued new regulations banning...

Media
10.03.14

Under Different Umbrellas

Zhang Xiaoran

“Dozens of mainlanders were taken away by the police because they openly supported Occupy Central and at least ten of them have been detained…They are in Jiangxi, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Chongqing, Guangzhou, etc,” Hong Kong-based blogger...

Media
10.01.14

Media Portrays Hong Kong Protests as Either Inspiring or Dangerous

Rachel Lu

The second and third days of mass protests to demand broader democracy in Hong Kong ended with none of the violence...

Media
10.01.14

They Can Take Our Freedom, But They Will Never Take Our Instagram

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

When thousands of Hong Kong protesters clashed with police on Sunday, September 28, many residents of the city...

Media
09.29.14

In China, the Most Censored Day of the Year

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

Censors on Weibo, China’s massive Twitter-like microblogging platform, just had their biggest day of the year. And once again, it was events in the special administrative region of Hong Kong, not the Chinese mainland, that triggered it.

...

Media
09.25.14

An Internet Where Nobody Says Anything

David Wertime

Here is what a court in Urumqi, the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, concludes Ilham Tohti, a balding, thick-set, 44-year-old professor, did: “Using ‘Uighur Online...

Media
09.18.14

‘What’s So Wrong with Splitting up?’

David Wertime

It reads like an Orwellian threat to all Scots: "The English government needs to immediately commence political thought education, and Scotland needs to be ruled by someone patriotic. Strike hard against separatist forces! Let every department at...

Media
09.12.14

A New Definition of Chinese Patriotism

Rachel Lu

China’s ruling Communist Party has a message for Chinese citizens: You are for us, or you are against us.That’s the takeaway from a widely discussed September 10 opinion piece in pro-party tabloid Global Times, in which Chen Xiankui, a...

Media
09.10.14

iPhone 6: Designed in California, Leaked in China

David Wertime

China’s cyberspace is bursting with anticipation for the iPhone 6—never mind that it promises to cost more than most citizens make in a month. Apple, the U.S.-based company that designs and sells the iPhone, had scheduled a major...

Media
09.02.14

Anti-Vice Click-Bait Spawns Popular Govt. Social Media Feed

Alexa Olesen

The Chinese government institution with the biggest social media following goes to...the nationwide anti-vice campaign called "Strike the four blacks, Eliminate the four harms." ...

Media
08.27.14

A ‘School Bus and a Ferrari’

Communication between China and the United States can often resemble ships passing in the night—or planes passing through international airspace. But when it comes to this particularly fraught bilateral relationship, perhaps metaphors are best...

Media
08.07.14

Beards and Muslim Headscarves Banned From Buses In One Xinjiang City

A city in China’s remote western Xinjiang region has temporarily banned men with beards and women with Muslim headscarves from taking public...

Media
08.06.14

The Bizarre Fixation on a 23-Year-Old Woman

On August 4, a 6.5-magnitude earthquake viciously struck Ludian County, a township in the southwest province of...

Media
07.30.14

Paper Tiger

Isaac Stone Fish & Rachel Lu

For 10 months, the fate of Zhou Yongkang existed in a space of plausible deniability. Respected Western media outlets had reported...

Media
07.30.14

Say It Ain’t So, Zhou

It was an exchange perfectly tailored for modern Chinese politics: alternately unscripted and cagey, chummy but laced with a hint of menace. At a Beijing press conference following a Chinese Communist Party meeting in early March, a reporter for...

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