Taxi Drivers in China Have Highest PM2.5 Air Pollutant Exposure
from chinadialogueA study conducted by Greenpeace has revealed that taxi drivers suffer the greatest levels of exposure to PM2.5 air pollution: three times that of the average person, and five times the world standard.
The study, carried out by Greenpeace...
Car-Driving Officials in China Urged to Get on a Bus
from chinadialogueChina’s new leadership has asked government officials to travel simply and, in normal circumstances, not to close roads to ease their journeys. In a recent visit to the Qianhai area of Shenzhen, south China, incoming president Xi Jinping made...
“Help Me Pay This Bill”: A Short But Incisive Send-Up of Chinese Corruption
It is a social media classic, a send-up of the corruption and profligacy that so often enrage Web users in China. A very short story variously titled “I Did Not Eat For Free” and “Help Me Pay This Bill” has been making the rounds for months on...
Why Are Entrepreneurs So Uneasy?
I’m often asked whether it’s more difficult for a Chinese company to survive now than it was in the 1980s, when I started my business. The two eras are indeed different. Many entrepreneurs with whom I shared the stage at awards ceremonies have...
How a Run-Down Government Building Became the Hottest Item on China’s Social Web
It is perhaps a sign of the times in China that an image of nothing more than a ramshackle county government building could echo so widely. Since its posting on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, hours before New Year’s Eve, the image (see below) has...
China’s New “Middle Class” Environmental Protests
from chinadialogueChina’s urban residents (or the new “middle class”) protest on the streets only very rarely. Discontent is expressed almost exclusively online, via angry typing. But this has changed over the last five years—protests have come offline and on to...
Desperate Cash Infusions Driving Blood Trade
The tumor was growing, and the family of cancer patient Xia Jianqing was growing desperate.
Doctors at a military hospital in Beijing had warned Xia’s family that he would die without the blood needed for a lifesaving operation. But the...
Uncertain Future for Architectural Treasures
Nestled between mountains and a winding river in a scenic corner of Shanxi province is Zhongyang County, the home of an exquisite Confucian temple built during the Ming dynasty.
The colorful wooden temple graced this idyllic valley for...
College Graduates Compete for Jobs Sweeping Streets
from TabletTong Peng spent six months discovering his bachelor’s degree was “worthless” before deciding to apply for a job as a street sweeper.
He graduated from college in Harbin in June, 2012, not expecting to find it so tough to find work with a...
Media Effort to Emphasize Newtown Tragedy Backfires in Blogosphere
Tragedy can strike anywhere. Mere hours before the horrific shooting at an American school in Newtown, Connecticut that left twenty-eight people dead, including twenty children, a horrific school attack also happened in China. At an elementary...
Unlikely Harvest
A little over month ago, I found myself traveling to rural Anhui province. Coal+Ice, the documentary photography exhibition I had produced for Asia Society, had been invited...
In Bo Xilai’s City, a Legacy of Backstabbing
A deathbed plea brought an unexpected guest to Li Zhuang’s home one day last March, setting in motion a legal process that soon may clear the Beijing lawyer’s name, throw out a number of convictions, and close a sordid chapter of the Bo Xilai...
Mobile Phones Souring Africa’s Image of China
Every day, about a dozen mobile phone wholesalers field orders and manufacturer offers from offices inside a nondescript, five-story building on Luthuli Avenue in downtown Nairobi.
The building doesn’t look like a hub for global commerce,...
The “Chinese Dream” Means One Thing to its Leaders, and Another to its People
Since China unveiled the new Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the country’s Web users have been paying close attention to the new elite group of leaders who will set the country’s agenda...
Sheng Keyi on Mo Yan: “Literature Supersedes Politics and Everything Else”
In a recent conversation at the Asia Society, novelist Sheng Keyi said she felt the critism of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize was unjustified. The...
Yu Jie: Awarding Mo Yan the Nobel Prize Was a “Huge Mistake”
Mo Yan accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm on December 10.
The 57-year-old novelist often writes stories based on memories of his village childhood, and his work and his political views have triggered wide debate. ...
What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong
When Chinese novelist Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this week, the relationship between literature and politics attracted much attention. The...
New Leaders’ Common Touch Gives Netizens “Great Hope”
Glad-handing with the locals. Kissing babies. Eating fast food. These are tried and true ways that American politicians seek to advertise their common touch; but when China’s new leaders employ these methods, it is greeted as a pleasant surprise...
Environmentalist Liu Futang Found Guilty of “Illegal Business Activities”
from chinadialogueWell-known Chinese environmentalist Liu Futang has been convicted of carrying out “illegal business activities,” given a three-year suspended prison sentence, and fined 17,000 yuan.
Liu Futang,...
Who Pays When a Wealth Product Fails?
A crowd of angry investors packed a Shanghai branch of Huaxia Bank on December 3 after they heard that the money wasn’t there for the first of four repayments for a 119 million-yuan wealth management plan. They demanded their money back from...
A China Frontier: Once the Border of Borders
In 1961, when I first arrived in Hong Kong as an aspiring young China scholar, there was something deeply seductive about the way this small British enclave of capitalism clung like a barnacle to the enormity of China’s socialist revolution....
Toxic Effects and Environmental Nondisclosure
High-profile talk emphasizing environmental action at the Communist Party’s 18th national congress attracted a lot of attention. News from the November proceedings spurred industry demands for more information and pushed stock prices...
Chinese AIDS Activist Endures “Degradation” in New York, Determined to Finish What She Started
Chinese people translate “New Yorker” into “New York Ke” to designate people living in New York City, including Chinese immigrants. But in Chinese, “ke” means “visitor” or “guest.” It has been a sad word in Chinese literature and poems...
Russia’s Siberian Dams Power “Electric Boilers” in Beijing
from chinadialogueThe underdeveloped, sparsely populated Eastern Siberia region that shares a 4,000-kilometer border with China has vast resources to offer its heavily populated and fast-developing neighbor. Hydroelectricity is key among them.
A major new...
Spotted on Weibo: Chinese Leaders Share a Human Moment
An active Beijing-based micro-blogger named Dongdong Wang recently tweeted this image on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter: {vertical_photo_right}
At first glance, it doesn’t look like much: Outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao (left) and outgoing...
Millions Await News of Test-tube Panda Taotao’s “Return” to the Wild
from chinadialogueOn October 11, at the age of two years and two months, giant panda Taotao went home.
This was China’s second attempt to introduce a giant panda born through artificial insemination into the wild. Unlike last time, however, Taotao was born...
When Tradition is Flattened by Policy
A “tomb-flattening policy” in Henan province has sparked intense controversy, with millions of tombs reportedly destroyed by local authorities in a quest to turn graveyards into farmland.
The policy can be seen as a historical extension of...
Asset Transparency Urged to Fight Government Graft
Calls for government officials to disclose personal and family assets are growing louder in China, mainly in reaction to the rising number of corruption cases affecting officialdom.
And some officials are listening. A local Communist Party...
A New Tower of Babel
Xu Bing, the renowned Chinese artist whose many laurels include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and an appointment as vice president of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, has long...
A Conservative Commentator Calls Out Chinese Liberals, and Liberals Shout Back
Speech on the Chinese Internet, it seems, is beginning to thaw once more following the country’s leadership transition. After months of speculation, new Chinese leader Xi Jinping was announced on November 16 at the close of the 18th...
As 18th Congress Ends, a Peek into the Process
Over the past twenty years, economist Zhang Zhuoyuan has witnessed and actively participated in building the nation’s economic policy.
He participated in the drafting of reports at each of the Communist Party’s three previous national...
Age of China’s New Leaders May Have Been Key to Their Selection
Earlier this week, before the new Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) and Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party were announced, I argued that the Party faces the difficult problem of how to allocate power in the...
An Insight into the Green Vocabulary of the Chinese Communist Party
from chinadialogueAfter years of neglect, the environment is gradually gaining more attention from China’s leaders. The most noticeable manifestation of this is in their vocabulary.
Six months ago, Hu Jintao, speaking at the opening of a study session for...
China’s Low-Carbon Zones Lack Motivation, Guidance, and Ideas
from chinadialogueNone of China’s so-called low-carbon industrial zones currently live up to the name. That’s the conclusion to draw from the work of the U.S. Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), which this year released a...
China’s Next Leaders: A Guide to What’s at Stake
Just a little more than a week after the American presidential election, China will choose its own leaders in its own highly secretive way entirely inside the Communist Party. What’s at stake for China—and for the rest of the world—is not just...
Weighing Risks Amid a Wealth Management Boom
Is China’s wealth management business a booming profit volcano for investors, or just another smoke-and-mirrors pyramid scheme?
It’s a question dividing the nation’s bankers and banking regulators as investors of all kinds pour cash into...
