China’s outgoing premier Wen Jiabao vowed that the government would solve the country’s ever-worsening pollution in his final work report yesterday as he opened the annual session of parliament.
But coming amid rising public concern about...
Imagine a luxury goods shopper so confident and flush with cash that one day he walks into a Shanghai handbag shop, flashes 300,000 yuan, and waltzes out with almost every bag in stock.
That’s what happened last year at a Prada store where...
China is under pressure to regulate its rampant trade in illegal ivory and tiger parts ahead of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), opening this weekend in...
On a frigid Friday morning at the end of 2012, a stream of expectant concertgoers poured through the cavernous lobby of the China National Center for the Performing Arts. They had come to...
When the Fukushima nuclear disaster struck, China was building new nuclear power capacity at a rate unprecedented in world history: 40 percent of all reactors planned or under construction were in China. Targets for installed nuclear generation...
A month after the conclusion of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 18th National Congress, the new Secretary General of the CCP and Central Military Commission, comrade Xi Jinping, left Beijing to visit Shenzhen, the first foothold of...
Flames of a public relations disaster were licking at the heels of a private equity firm when China’s most notorious Internet-scrubbing company rode to the rescue.
Saving the Shenzhen-based firm’s image was not cheap, and it took more than...
Engineers, inventors, and industrial futurists in China are setting sights on a new technological frontier as three-dimensional printing slowly revolutionizes manufacturing.
A Beijing University research team, for example, has been working...
The extraordinary growth of China’s cities is well-known. Today, 160 Chinese metropolises have over one million inhabitants and more than half the population lives in urban areas, which are growing at two to three times the rate of Western cities...
It appears that Chinese environmental activism is going further mainstream. The Sina micro-blogging account of Global Times, a well-known Communist Party mouthpiece, has just shared news about the horrific proliferation of “cancer...
Within twenty-four hours of registration, Sina Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) deleted the microblog account of Frank Hsieh, former premier of Taiwan’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Ironically, Hsieh’s last tweet...
Nearly five weeks ago, Beijing experienced its worst day of air quality on record: Levels of PM2.5—small particulates that can cause lung, cardiovascular, and respiratory disease—soared to more than thirty times the level considered safe by the...
As The New York Times reported yesterday evening, U.S.-based cybersecurity firm...
After recent heated debate over China’s mega-dam plans, any visitor to the launch on February 11 of the U.N.’s much-vaunted International Year of Water Cooperation ...
Tea Leaf Nation editor David Wertime spoke on February 15 on Public Radio International’s The World about NBA star Kobe Bryant...
What should China do to persuade its moody ally North Korea to comply with international restrictions on its nuclear ambitions?
“Free...
In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama committed to confronting climate change, stating, “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead...
The global nuclear sector has been through something of an apocalyptic patch since the disaster at Fukushima—from power station shutdowns in Japan and...
A policeman draws his gun to stop a desperately escaping criminal. It may sound sensational, but this is technically what happened in the southern Chinese megalopolis of Guangzhou on January 31. As traffic policemen were manning a drunk driving...
Is “bromance” in the air? Not according to state-run China Central Television (CCTV).
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Thousands of fans yelled “Get together” in unison when piano prodigy Li Yundi made a guest appearance at Chinese-American pop...
Like it or not, it takes an American woman to give a face, bring a voice, and deliver a victory to battered women in China. On February 3, a milestone...
In January 2013, Australia’s biggest supermarket chain Woolworths began restricting sales of baby formula to four tins per customer after a massive increase in demand stripped shelves bare of popular brands such as Karicare.
The buyers...
One of my favorite pictures collected in the book Shangri-La: Along the Tea Road to Lhasa is of six pilgrims coming down an empty stretch of the Chamagudao, the...
The cameras could be rolling soon for long-anticipated stock listings by the nation’s largest movie producer and foreign flick importer China Film Group, as well as a smaller but ambitious rival, Shanghai Film Group.
The state-owned...
Beijingers are choking on their air—again. Just seventeen days after Chinese cyberspace erupted with complaints about air so...
Wiretapping, email hacking, cell phone tracking, and secret videotaping are just a few of the cloak-and-dagger techniques long employed by police in the course of criminal investigations in China.
But now, for the first time, new rules say...
Are Chinese audiences growing weary of anti-Japanese propaganda? It would seem that some, at least, are growing sick of the pathetic villains, superhuman heroes, and lame endings that many Chinese movies and television series about World War II,...
Sanjiangyuan—which literally translates as the “three river source area”—feeds China’s mightiest rivers. The 300,000-square kilometer region, high on western China’s Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, provides a quarter of the Yangtze’s water, almost half...
This past fall, my colleague Sun Yunfan and I were preparing to bring Coal+Ice, the documentary...
On Friday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that income inequality in the country exceeds a warning level set by the United Nations.
China’s...
Around 9,000 feet up, on a remote mountaintop in the state of Oregon, a group of researchers are on the lookout. It is not planes or wildlife they are tracking but pollution clouds.
The monitoring site is run by Dan Jaffe, professor of...
Now is the right time for China to implement its global outreach strategy.
While seizing this opportunity, we should also guard against risk first, with a sense of calmness. This means adhering to business decisions and sound operations,...
Last week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to embrace the Internet....
Last year, China made a breakthrough in the publication of air quality data, as more than sixty cities started to monitor and publish levels of the dangerous air pollutant PM2.5. But the figures themselves were depressing. With PM2.5—fine...
As part of our continuing series on China’s recent leadership transition, Arthur Ross Fellow Ouyang Bin sat down with political scientist Andrew Nathan, who published...
Last weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the pages of The New York Times that he feels moderately confident...
The Hong Kong branch of China Development Bank (CDB) has been ordered by its Beijing headquarters to cancel loans that would have been used to finance an acquisition involving the nation’s second-largest insurer, a bank source said.
The...
The notorious system that lets police send detainees to labor camps without trial will be halted this year, said Meng Jianzhu, secretary of the Central Politics and Law Commission, at a conference on January 7.
Meng said the Communist...
Legal experts have called on the government to follow through with hints at abolishing the country’s notorious system of labor camps.
On January 7, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu said at a top conference that the system would “cease to be...
The Qiantang River is the most important river in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, one of the country’s most developed regions. On its banks, textiles plants work to supply fashion labels around the world. But they are polluting the environment...
When Mr. Tuo Zhen, the propaganda chief of Guangdong province, rewrote and replaced the New Year’s editorial of the Southern Weekend newspaper without the consent of its editors, he probably did not think it would make much of a splash....
