His Start in Oil Fuelled Zhou’s Rise to Top Cop
Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party's supreme decision-making body, has been the highest ranking Party cadre to be a target of a corruption investigation.
The Party's graft fighters...
A Chinese Town’s Imported Cambodian Brides
It is a hot and sticky midsummer day in a small village along the Chang River in the eastern province of Jiangxi. The most popular spot is in front of the local grocery where a few women are playing mahjong as children chase each other around....
Making It in China and the U.S.
Emily Parker is a creator of Green Electronics: A U.S.-China Maker Challenge. The Green Electronics Challenge was an unprecedented collaboration between the New America...
Can a Pollution-Tracking App Kickstart Transparency?
from chinadialogueIt seems counter-intuitive that publicly available data needs grassroots activists to make it accessible. Yet, in a sea of regulations and information, official environmental information can be difficult to parse.
The risk of information...
China Grows An Interest in Organic Foods
Late last month, news broke that a major Chinese supplier of American fast food brands was peddling meat that violated...
How Tianjin’s Top Cop Built Web of Corruption Over 40 Years
The fall of the public security chief, Wu Changshun, of the northern port city of Tianjin has rocked the local public security system and shed light on the graft network cultivated by Wu over 40 years.
The Central Discipline Inspection...
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...
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...
Top One Percent Has One-Third of China’s Wealth
A recent academic report on wealth inequality in China shows that the top one percent of households holds one-third of total assets, while the bottom fourth holds only one percent.
The report, published by a research institute in Peking...
Ex-Politburo Members Accused of ‘Serious Discipline Violations’ Always Face Courts
After much speculation, the axe has finally fallen on Zhou Yongkang, the former public security chief and member of the Politburo Standing Committee, indicating the Communist Party’s campaign against corruption will grant no exceptions to the...
Paper Tiger
For 10 months, the fate of Zhou Yongkang existed in a space of plausible deniability. Respected Western media outlets had reported...
Moving a Mountain, of Trash
from chinadialogueOn July 1, tough new standards for pollution from waste incinerators came into effect. The move is an attempt to end the conflict between communities across China and the nearby rubbish-burning plants they believe threaten their health and house...
Stability the Watchword for Progress in China
Chinese diplomacy has had a busy few months, with numerous visits abroad by leaders and a constant stream of foreign leaders coming to the country.
Amid the flurry of activity, two meetings were particularly noteworthy: the sixth U.S.-...
Everybody Hates Rui
He may be widely reviled in his home country, but oh, what a resume: The son of an author and screenwriter; a graduate of the prestigious China Foreign Affairs...
The Legacy of Hunan’s Polluted Soils
from chinadialogueThis is the second of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360...
China Faces Long Battle to Clean Polluted Soil
from chinadialogueThis is the third of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360...
U.S.-China Climate Cooperation More Crucial Than Ever
from chinadialogueAs the governments of the United States and China meet in Beijing this week for the Sixth U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), one area worth...
Changing the Chinese Embassy’s Address to Liu Xiaobo Plaza Is a Silly Idea
I rarely agree with the Chinese Embassy in Washington, but an amendment making its way through Congress has made me unlikely bedfellows with Beijing’s Washington diplomats.
Representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.) has sponsored an amendment to...
Hard Choices for Family Planners and Parents
The technocrats in charge of China's one-child policy have the power to force sterilizations, abortions, and intra-uterine device (IUD) implants, as well as punish uncooperative parents by denying them jobs, denying their children schooling, and...
The Victims of China’s Soil Pollution Crisis
from chinadialogueThis is the first of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360, with...
Inside the Mind of a Chinese Hacker
In May, the U.S. announced the indictment of five Chinese hackers for breaking into the computers of U.S. companies. The men went by code names like UglyGorilla and KandyGoo. A recent report revealed that the hackers, who worked for Unit 61398 of...
China Pulling the Plug on Foreign Mainframes
E-commerce companies and banks in China are scrapping hardware and uninstalling software for mainframe servers made by American suppliers in favor of homegrown brands said to be safe, advanced, and a lot less expensive.
The movement has...
Germany’s Renewables Paradox a Warning Sign for China
from chinadialogueFrom the hay field behind his house, Gunter Jurischka points out the solar panels glittering from the town’s rooftops and the towering wind turbines spinning lazily on the horizon.
Thanks to Germany’s now famous...
Top Political Advisor Investigated for Graft
A vice chairman of the country's top political advisory body is being investigated for "serious violations of discipline," the Communist Party's anti-graft fighter says.
The Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) did not provide...
What China Should Say at the U.N. Climate Change Summit
from chinadialogueWith a little more than 100 days to go, countries are gearing up for Ban Ki-moon’s New York climate summit, the first climate convention of world leaders since Copenhagen...
China’s Retiring Migrant Workers Have No Place to Call Home
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....
Leaning In ... to Corruption
It's no secret that graft is an essential part of climbing the Chinese Communist Party ranks. Now, according to Chinese state...
Arrested Chinese Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang Speaks from Prison
The Dead Swans of Dongting Lake
from chinadialogueI’ve lost track of how many nights I spent traveling to Dongting Lake, a large, shallow lake in Hunan province, central China, famed for being the origin of dragon-boat racing.
In mid-January 2013 I met the Yueyang River Porpoise...
A Jesuit Astronomer in a Qing Emperor’s Court
Of the 920 Jesuits who served in the China mission between 1552 and 1800, only the Italian Matteo Ricci (Li Madou) remains well known. This is understandable—it was Ricci who first gained permission for the Jesuits to live in Beijing and who...
A Time-Lapse Map of Protests Sweeping China in 1989
Resources on the Tiananmen Square Protests: 25 Years Later
This June 4 marks 25 years since the military crackdown on student protestors in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, following months of demonstrations. This resource page includes links to our recently published pieces and to our archived...
Threats to Anonymous Sources Shake Chinese Journalism
Courts in the capital are mulling over what's being described as the first legal attack against the use of anonymous sources in news reports published by the Chinese media.
The charges leveled against the Guangzhou-based Southern...
China’s Experiment with Deliberative Democracy
Chinese pro-democracy protests begun in the late spring of 1989 led to the brutal military suppression on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 25 years ago this June 4. Around the world, discussions of the events of that spring have been well underway for...
Killing Pika Won’t Save Tibetan Grasslands
from chinadialogueA pest extermination campaign is under way on western China’s Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. But experts say there is no scientific basis for the killing of the pika, a small rabbit-like...
Infographic: China’s Pig Footprint
from chinadialogueMeat invariably means pig in China, with pork accounting for 65% of the meat consumed in the country.
And after...
Netizens Complain Chinese Government Was Slow to Respond to Violence in Vietnam
On May 18, Hong Lei, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said China “will suspend some of its plans for bilateral exchanges with Vietnam in response to the deadly violence against Chinese nationals in the country,”...
One Uighur Man’s Journey in Two Cultures
Over the past two months, the relationship between China’s estimated 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people, most of whom follow some form of Sunni Islam,...
“White Glove” Sisters at Center of Coal Country Graft Scandal
Two sisters with business savvy and important friends in high places are now the standout figures in the mysterious case of a former Shanxi province government official, Jin Daoming, charged with corruption.
Few details of the Jin case...
Government Steps Up To Labor’s Demands
On April 14, most of the 40,000 workers at the Dongguan Yue Yuen shoe factory—supplier to Nike, Adidas, and other international brands—began what would become a two-week work stoppage. While there are thousands of strikes in China every year, the...
Anti-Chinese Sentiment on Rise in Myanmar
from chinadialogueThe Shwe pipeline shaves an angry bald strip across the red clay hills and disappears into the morning mist. A sign hanging above an area cordoned off by bamboo fencing warns in English, “Severe punishment on pipeline destruction.”
“...
