‘A Letter to My Friend under Quarantine in Wuhan’
from Yuanjin PhotoHighlighting Chinese visual storytellers’ coverage of COVID-19 inside China. Some of these storytellers were on the ground documenting the experience of residents and medical workers in Wuhan, the city where the virus first emerged. Other...
‘They Feel Like They Can’t Go Home’
In September 2014, while waiting for access to photograph Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, a Chinese photographer who calls himself “Ali” came upon a large group of students from his home country at a local restaurant. He knew that many young...
‘Nowhere to Dock’
from Yuanjin PhotoIn 2019, Depth of Field showcased stories covering a range of topics: Shi Yangkun’s nostaglic exploration of China’s last collective villages, Zhu Lingyu’s...
‘I Love HK but Hate It at the Same Time’
A central issue many of the Hong Kong people in my portraits are wrestling with is how to define an identity and being challenged in that pursuit by cultural, social, or political pressures. There is a lot of frustration and anger over the recent...
Chiang Mai’s Chinese Transfer Students
On a chilly winter Friday in early 2013, seven-year-old Zou Yanhu came home from school, looking dejected. Yanhu was a first-grader attending a public primary school in Chengdu, Sichuan’s sprawling capital city. His weekend homework was to write...
Living by the Rivers
from Yuanjin PhotoIf the stories in this edition of Depth of Field share a common thread—apart from their distinguished photographic storytelling—it’s their interest in the flux and churn of life in China in 2019, where nothing seems fixed and pressure of constant...
The Face of China’s #MeToo Movement Enters the Fray
In the summer of 2014, Zhou Xiaoxuan, then a 21-year-old living in Beijing, filed a report with the local police. She described what had happened the previous day when she had delivered a basket of fruit to one of China’s most prominent news...
What Chinese Charities Are Facing, in One Easy Chart
Earlier this year, the China-based organization NGOCN released the results of a survey to determine how...
The Choreographed Global Journey of Your Household Products
U.S.-China trade is not merely a political question; it exists within a massive system that has been built over decades, the accretive results of countless choices by governments, businesses, consumers, and workers. It is at once a heaving,...
From Pimp to Politician
Walking through Kabukichō, a densely packed red-light district in Tokyo, one sometime spots 58-year-old Li Xiaomu, eager to point tourists to a good time. Born in the city of Changsha, Hunan province, Li moved to Tokyo in 1988 to study fashion...
Visualizing China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign
“Catching Tigers and Flies” is ChinaFile’s interactive tool for tracking and, we hope, better understanding the massive campaign against corruption that Xi Jinping launched shortly after he came to power in late 2012. It is designed to give users...
The Window
I have spent three years collecting accounts and examining how survivors and families have coped since that traumatic event. I document the lingering pain, to resist public forgetting and indifference. Hundreds of photographs bear witness to the...
Ou Chen’s Good Run
The number of Chinese racers has risen dramatically—a phenomenon that Chinese media call a “marathon fever.” Obed Tiony, a Kenyan studying at Shanghai University, works as an agent for some 300 runners from Kenya and its neighbor Ethiopia. Tiony’...
23 Days, 1,300 Miles, and Some Very High Expectations
“We were at an altitude of 15,000 feet on Mount Haizi. It started to hail. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees. We were only wearing t-shirts. They didn’t stop biking.” It was photographer Wang He’s second time on the Tibetan Plateau. The first...
Slow Trains, Shrinking Boomtowns, and Men Who Know Ice
from Yuanjin PhotoIn this issue of Depth of Field, we take a ride on one of China’s slowest trains, meet the workers who cut the ice for Harbin’s winter festival, and follow two mentally disabled “sent-down youth” on a rare trip home to visit their families. Also...
When You Give a Kid a Camera
from Yuanjin PhotoThis dispatch of photojournalism from China cuts across a broad spectrum of society, from film screenings in Beijing for the visually impaired to an acrobatics school 200 miles south, in Puyang, Henan province, and from children in rural Sichuan...
Fake Girlfriends, Chengdu Rappers, and a Chow Chow Making Bank
from Yuanjin PhotoLonely dog owners in Beijing and a rented girlfriend in Fujian; the last Oroqen hunters in Heilongjiang and homegrown hip hop in Chengdu; young Chinese in an Indian tech hub and Hong Kong apartments only slightly larger than coffins—these are...
Down From the Mountains
At 14 years old, Wang Ying doesn’t want to be a mother. She scowls darkly as her younger brother and sister squabble in the corner while she does the housework. But she grudgingly cleans up after them and cooks them a potato stew...
The Town at the Heart of China’s Black Market in Ivory
Last year, in response to mounting criticism for its key role in the steep decline in the world’s elephant population, China...
I Married a Beautiful Ukrainian Woman and So Can You
Mei Aisi owes his business to his Internet celebrity, and his celebrity to his wife. Before he met her, Mei, a working-class native of the northern Chinese city of Chengde, didn’t have much going for him. He’d scored poorly on...
Showing the Dead a Good Time
This photo gallery is part of Tomoko Kikuchi’s “Drag Queens for the Dearly Departed,” a project she shot as an Abigail Cohen Fellow in Documentary Photography. Too see the...
Inspirational Vandalism, Theme Parks, and the Man Who Swam to Hong Kong
from Yuanjin PhotoThis month, five photo galleries explore different aspects of public and private space in contemporary China. Wu Yue meets a couple who swam to Hong Kong from Guangzhou during the Cultural Revolution and still find solace in the waters of Hong...
Where The Streets Had My Name
If you’re not dead yet and you were never very famous, can you still get a street named after you in Beijing? You can if you’re 27-year-old artist Ge Yulu. Open Google Maps, enter his name, and there you will find a 1,476-foot-...
Love, Robots, and Fireworks
from Yuanjin PhotoIncluded in this Depth of Field column are stories of love, community, remembrance, and the future, told through the discerning eyes of some of China’s best photojournalists. Among them, the lives of African migrants in Guangzhou, seven years...
From the Inside Looking Out
from Yuanjin PhotoEach March, Beijing hosts the “Two Sessions,” massive meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Members of the two bodies of the nation’s legislature meet for a week in...
Trafficked into Wedlock
When Buntha left Cambodia to marry a Chinese man, she did so for money, not for love.
Thirty-two years old at the time, and never married, she had few opportunities to earn money for her family in her village in Kampong...
Refugees from Myanmar, Migrant Workers, and the Lantern Festival
from Yuanjin PhotoThis month, we feature galleries published in February that showcase photographers’ interest in China’s borders and its medical woes, the lives of its minorities and their traditions and customs, and—in the case of Dustin Shum’s...
House Calls on the Tibetan Plateau, Children of Divorce, Celebrity Secrets
from Yuanjin PhotoIn the final galleries of 2016, the publishing juggernaut Tencent again shows its leadership in the documentary photography space, but iFeng’s choice to publish a personal photo gallery by Zhou Xin is also worth a good look, especially since...
Seeing 2016 Through Eyes on China
In June 2015, a couple dozen China-based photographers—some Chinese, some not—founded the Instagram account Eyes on China. Their goal, as member photographer Gilles...
From West Africa, the Czech Republic, and Home
from Yuanjin PhotoIn this month’s Depth of Field, Chinese photojournalists explore foreign terrain, both beyond China’s borders and within them. Independent photographer Yuyang Liu traveled the open seas to document the lives of Chinese and African...
Same Tough Start, Radically Different Lives
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...
Dongbei’s Last Match Factory, Capital Straphangers, Retracing the Long March...
from Yuanjin PhotoIn October, several publications marked the 80th Anniversary of the Chinese Communists’ Long March. We have chosen two stories that revisited this event and that were standouts, visually. Elsewhere, photographers...
Over-Protective Mothers, E-cigarettes, Sports Hunting, and More
from Yuanjin PhotoA photojournalist’s job is to capture the unique and the universal—to portray brief moments that tell individual stories, yet are instantly relatable to a wide audience. The delightful task of curating that type of Chinese...
African Migrants in Guangzhou, Forgetting, Family Planning’s Fate, and More...
from Yuanjin PhotoPhotographing the aftermath of catastrophic events is challenging—one that photographer Mu Li handles with creativity and grace looking back at the chemical explosion in Tianjin that damaged as many as 17,000 homes August 12, 2015. Another...
Creating Internet Celebrities, Personal Shoppers, Queer Life, and More
from Yuanjin PhotoNatural disasters and trend stories are the bread and butter of photojournalists and July was no exception. We bring you the work of photographers who explored the burgeoning world of cellphone celebrities, waded into flood-struck areas, and...