ChinaFile Presents: Shifting Terrain in U.S.-China Relations, Xi Jinping’s Vision for China’s Future
On March 11, ChinaFile and the Center for China Analysis (CCA) hosted a conversation between Julian Gewirtz, a historian, China expert, and former senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council under President Joe...
ChinaFile Presents: ‘Her Lotus Year,’ a Conversation with Paul French
Paul French is a prolific author of books on pre-revolutionary 20th Century China and the stories of foreigners who lived and worked there, including the bestselling true-crime history, Midnight in Peking. His work is...
ChinaFile Presents: ‘Nikah,’ a Film Screening and Discussion
The film ‘Nikah,’ set in China’s Uyghur region in 2017, spans the months between two weddings. It follows Dilber, a young woman approaching a crossroads amid the Chinese government’s surveilling and detaining of members of her community. As even...
ChinaFile Presents: Peter Hessler’s ‘Other Rivers: A Chinese Education’
ChinaFile Presents: A Wild Ride through China’s Economy with Author Anne Stevenson-Yang
The 1980s were an extraordinary time of hope in China, both for its citizens and for foreign visitors. Anne Stevenson-Yang first went to China in 1985, where she was enchanted by the lively cultural scene and what seemed to be the growing...
ChinaFile Presents: China Reporting in Exile
ChinaFile Presents: Nury Turkel, No Escape
ChinaFile Presents: Surveillance State—Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control
Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin discussed their new book with ChinaFile Senior Editor Jessica Batke and Arthur Ross Director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell. Surveillance State: Inside China’s...
ChinaFile Presents: In the Camps—China’s High-Tech Penal Colony
Darren Byler joined ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes and Jessica Batke to discuss his new book, In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. Evidence has mounted in recent years that China’s government has incarcerated more than one million Uyghurs and...
ChinaFile Presents: Erasing History—Why Remember Tiananmen
On the evening of June 3, ChinaFile hosted a discussion on the Chinese government’s efforts to control, manipulate, and forestall remembrance of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the bloody crackdown that ended them. Participating in the...
Six Questions and Four Articles About Tiananmen Square
Why can’t we banish history from our memories? The author Ling Zhijun titled his 2008 exploration of Mao Zedong’s disastrous people’s communes “History No Longer Lingers,” and it sometimes feels counterintuitive that we cannot forget past...
ChinaFile Presents: Hong Kong’s Relationship with Beijing, An Update
ChinaFile hosted a conversation at the Asia Society on May 9, with veteran Hong Kong legislator and rule of law advocate Martin Lee, longtime journalist and media rights expert Mak Yin-ting, and democracy activist Nathan Law, moderated by...
ChinaFile Presents: The Situation in Xinjiang
Reporting from Xinjiang
On September 20, 2018, ChinaFile and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) co-hosted a discussion with BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan on her reporting on state-sponsored ethnic and religious repression in Xinjiang and, in particular...
Chinese Civil Society in 2018: What’s Ahead?
The impetus for this event is it’s about a year since the new Foreign NGO Law was implemented in China. There was also another law implemented in 2016, the Charity Law, that governs how domestic NGOs function in China. But there’s a lot more...
China’s Animated Underbelly
from China Film InsiderA tousled-haired young man in a third-tier Chinese city is desperate to fix the botched plastic surgery done on his fiancée’s face. At knifepoint, he steals a satchel of one million yuan from a local gangster, setting off a chain-...
The German Edition of the Falun Gong-Affiliated ‘Epoch Times’ Aligns with the Far Right
On the eve of the German election Sunday, it’s no surprise that Russian state-funded media outlets are attacking German Chancellor Angela Merkel, sensationalizing migrant violence, and providing conciliatory coverage of far-right...
Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century
The following is an edited transcript of a live event hosted at Asia Society in New York on September 7, 2017, and named for a new book by Richard McGregor, the former Beijing Bureau Chief of the Financial Times, “ChinaFile Presents...
American Universities in China: Free Speech Bastions or Threats to Academic Freedom?
from Asia BlogIn 1986, Johns Hopkins University opened a study center in Nanjing University, making it the first American institution of higher education allowed to establish a physical presence in China during the Communist era. Since then,...
Chinese Blame America for United Airlines
from Foreign PolicyThe video of David Dao being dragged kicking and screaming off a United Airlines flight by Chicago police set the American Internet aflame Monday. That’s not a surprise: Whether you blame the greed of American airlines or...
Surprise Findings: China’s Youth Are Getting Less Nationalistic, Not More
Anyone who’s spent any length of time following Western press coverage of China is familiar with the notion that China’s leaders are obligated to look tough in order to appease a rising nationalism. Much has been written about the...
U.S.-China Relations As a Cycle of ‘Rapturous Enchantment’ and ‘Deep Disappointment’
from Asia BlogIn 1872, China’s imperial government began sending teenage boys to the United States to study science and technology. After a series of “humiliating” military defeats at the hands of technologically superior foreign powers, China’...
The Chinese Democratic Experiment that Never Was
Protesters in southern China are up in arms. They feel that Beijing’s promises that they’d be able to vote for their own local leaders have been honored in the breach. They’re outraged at the show of force in the face of peaceful protest, and...
China Analysts Should Talk to Each Other, Not at Each Other
On August 12, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued its annual report card on China’s economy and gave the country mixed grades, finding...
The Future of China’s Legal System
In early August, Beijing held show trials of four legal activists—a disheartening turn for those optimistic about legal reform in...
How Chinese Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Their Military Again
Every evening, as regular and obstreperous as a rooster, the People’s Liberation Army (P.L.A.) soldiers sing from the barracks outside my Beijing home, a chorus of teenage troops reminding the neighborhood when it’s dinner time:...
Will China’s ‘Taobao Villages’ Spur a Rural Revolution?
from chinadialogueThe province of Shanxi, in northern China, is famous for coal mining...
The Chinese Trolls Who Pump Out 488 Million Fake Social Media Posts
They are the most hated group in Chinese cyberspace. They are, to hear their ideological opponents tell it, “fiercely ignorant,” keen to “insert themselves in everything,” and preen as if they were “spokesmen for the country.”...
Backward Thinking about Orientalism and Chinese Characters
For those of us who teach and research the Chinese language, it is often difficult to describe how the Chinese characters function in conveying meaning and sound, and it’s always a particular challenge to explain how the writing...
My Uncle Was a Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution—He Isn’t Sorry
Lishui is the nickname for my uncle, a farmer who has lived all his life in the suburbs of Tianjin, a big city in northeastern China. Whenever people talk about Lishui, my mother’s older brother, they always say: “Lishui is a nice...
The End of China’s Economic Miracle? A Discussion with ‘Financial Times’ Writers
On April 20, 2016, a panel of Financial Times correspondents and editors with China experience, joined by financier and occasional FT columnist George Soros, discussed rural-to-urban migration, wage growth, real...
Scandal Highlights China’s Weak Environmental Enforcement
from chinadialogueFor many Chinese, the country’s soil pollution crisis has become increasingly acute in recent weeks after several hundred children fell ill from attending a school built close to a former fertilizer factory.
Almost 500...
‘Taiwan Independence’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think
On February 23, all eyes were on Taiwan’s new Member of Parliament Freddy Lim as he took the podium at the Legislative...
Chinese Censors Rush to Make ‘Panama Papers’ Disappear
On April 3, the Washington, D.C.-based non-profit International Committee of Investigative Journalists dropped what struck many as a bombshell: news that a leaked trove of 11.5 million previously secret files from Panama-based law firm Mossack...
Taiwan’s New Direction
from Asia BlogIn January, Taiwan’s voters handed the traditionally pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) a landslide victory, giving it control of both the parliament and presidency for the first time ever. The victory came at the expense of the...
China’s Secret Weapon on Disputed Island: Beer and Badminton
Soldiers, ships, and military outposts are the usual tools of nations staking out their territory. But on disputed shoals in the South China Sea, Beijing may be deploying a new arsenal: soccer fields, pipelines, and tea shops....
New Video Celebrates Chinese Missiles With Old-School Communist Pomp
Trumpets sound and trombones blare as a warhead launches. Intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on trucks parade down the center of a boulevard crowded with bystanders. “We are the glorious Rocket Force,” a mixed choir sings...
Chinese Students Are Flooding U.S. Christian High Schools
It is no secret that Chinese students are pouring into the United States; over 300,000 of them attended U.S. colleges and universities in 2015 alone, and Chinese are filling up spots in U.S. secondary schools in search of a better...
