China's legislature on Saturday formally eased two restrictive social policies of its authoritarian system, allowing some couples to have a second child and ending a form of extralegal detention. The standing committee of the National People's...
For Chinese critics of the government, the border long ago acquired a political toll booth: Whichever way you cross, you pay a price.
Li Dongsheng, a vice minister of public security, is being investigated by the Communist Party for “suspected serious law and discipline violations,” according to Xinhua...
Chinese and foreign observers welcomed the recent announcement that the Chinese government will “abolish”—not merely reform—the administrative punishment system known as re-education through labor (RTL). The proclamation, part of a sixty-point...
Eight municipal governments in northeast Liaoning province have together received 54.2 million yuan (U.S.$8.9 million) in fines for failing to reach air quality...
China is increasingly using extra-judicial “black jails” and drug rehabilitation centers to punish people who would formerly have been sent to...
Pin Ho:
[Zhou Yongkang’s downfall] is the second chapter of the “Bo Xilai Drama”—a drama begun at the 18th Party Congress. The Party’s power transition has been secret and has lacked convincing procedure. This [lack of...
New reports confirm that Zhou Yongkang, China’s third most powerful politician, is under investigation for murder, corruption, and plotting to overthrow the government.
Four days after the U.S. government expressed concern about his...
State-run newspaper Global Times dismisses Western media comparisons between recently deceased anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison in South Africa, and veteran Chinese human rights advocate, Liu Xiaobo, now...
When China denied veteran journalist Paul Mooney’s visa request in November, neither the State Department, Administration officials nor anyone on Capitol Hill said anything publicly about a U.S. citizen appearing to be punished for his speech....
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping after an escalation in bilateral tensions since China’s declaration last month of an air-defense zone that overlaps with Japan’s over the East China Sea.
The story of self-censorship in China is a quieter tale of unwritten articles, avoided topics and careful phrasing.
Chinese journalists get an open door to the United States. This reflects U.S. values and is fundamentally correct. If China continues to exclude and threaten American journalists, the U.S. should inject a little more symmetry into its visa policy...
If Zhou Yongkang, 71, one of China's most powerful politicians of the last decade, were directly implicated in the probe, he would be the most senior...
This is the second in a two-part special report on the resettlement rights of villagers displaced by dams along the Mekong (Lancang) River. Part one is an analysis of how China’s...
Chen Weihua:
The Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) is not a Chinese invention. The United States, Japan and some 20 other countries declared such...
Leta Hong Fincher:
The Communist Party’s announcement that it will loosen the one-child policy is, of course, welcome news. Married couples will be allowed to have two children if only one of the spouses is an only child, meaning...
China's family-planning agency is projecting a slow rollout for an easing of its one-child policy, underscoring reluctance by the government in moving too quickly to let some couples have two children and a law in place for decades.
A reporter for Bloomberg News who worked on an unpublished article about China that employees for the company said had been killed for political reasons by top Bloomberg editors was suspended last week by managers.
The Chinese government will ease its one-child family restrictions and abolish “re-education through labor” camps, significantly curtailing two policies that for decades have defined the state’s power to control citizens’ lives.
After nearly three decades of rapid urbanization, China’s official and unofficial city dwellers outnumber its farmers....
The New Express condemned its reporter Chen Yongzhou for “accepting money to publish a large number of false reports” just days after it ran unprecedented front-page editorials decrying police violation of press freedom and defending his...
Bo Xilai’s “Smash the Black” campaign used ruthless measures to curb organized crime. The recent guilty verdict handed to Bo gives the Chinese leadership an opportunity to demonstrate that illegalities committed in the course of criminal...
A casual visitor to China today does not get the impression of a police state. Life bustles along as people pursue work, fashion, sports, romance, amusement, and so on, without any sign of being under coercion. But the government spends tens of...
Shanghai investor Wang Weihua’s final microblog post October 12 was brief and ominous: “The police are coming.”
Three days later, Wang’s family said he’d been taken into custody by police officers who traveled more than 3,600 kilometers to...
The latest ChinaFile Conversation focuses on the case of Chen Yongzhou, the Guangzhou New Express journalist whose series of investigative reports exposed fraud at the Changsha, Hunan-based heavy machinery maker...
The arrest of a journalist for allegedly damaging the reputation of an equipment manufacturer has...
A Guangzhou-based newspaper, the New Express, published a front-page editorial statement urging the Security Bureau of Hunan Province to release their investigative reporter Chen Yongzhou who was arrested for criminal defamation....
On October 25, the Shandong High People’s Court rejected the appeal of Bo Xilai, the former Party Secretary of Chongqing who on September 22 was convicted of bribe-taking,...
A court in eastern China said it would announce a decision on October 25 on whether to accept an appeal by ousted former senior politician Bo Xilai over his guilty verdict and life sentence on charges of bribery, corruption and abuse of...
Photos circulating on Chinese social media have bolstered the perception among Chinese citizens that victims of crime who hold foreign passports are granted special treatment and more attention by the police.
The report draws attention to a Chinese business environment corrupt due to minimal public-reporting requirements. Party leaders have warned that corruption threatens their grip on power and have announced anti-graft investigations of a...
Police in China have arrested an influential blogger and are holding a cartoonist in a widening crackdown on online “rumor-mongering”, friends and a lawyer for one of them said on Thursday October 17.
The vast state censorship apparatus works hard to keep Chinese social media’s most influential bloggers down. But posts race through Weibo so quickly that it’s difficult to control them with technology. Hence, the government is resorting to...
The new regulations state clearly that chengguan may not use profane or threatening language while enforcing their duties, may not damage private property, and may not use any form of violence or intimidation.
In May, two young brothers from Jiangsu province were badly burned after being tied to a tree by a third boy and set alight – allegedly imitating a scene from the popular cartoon “Pleasant Goat and Big, Big Wolf.”
China denounced on Monday a decision by a Spanish criminal court to indict former Chinese president Hu Jintao for genocide as part of an investigation into whether his government committed abuses in Tibet.
A Chinese provincial court announced on Wednesday that it will hear the appeal of Bo Xilai. Bo did not accept his sentence at the first trial at the Jinan Intermediate People's Court and submitted an appeal to the Shandong Higher People's...
In the trial of Li Tianyi, the 17-year-old son of prominent entertainers in the military on trial for gang rape, an important detail in the court’s recent ruling may improve thewelfare of the women who work in China’s illegal but widespread...
Xia Junfeng was once unknown, but his 2009 arrest for the murder of security officers—who, he alleged, had savagely beaten him—made him a symbolic figure in a national debate about human rights and reform in China. Yet many wonder whether this...
What was initially billed as a lucrative order from a European customer has pushed a Shandong Province shipbuilding company to the brink of bankruptcy and ruined its relationship with one of China’s biggest banks.
Rushan City Shipbuilding...
In a country whose citizens widely support capital punishment, street vendor Xia Junfeng’s execution has stoked a firestorm of public anger, much of it expressed through social media and directed at the double standards applied to ordinary...
Bo Xilai, the pugnacious Chinese politician whose downfall shook the Communist Party, was sentenced to life in prison after a court found him guilty of bribetaking, embezzlement and abuse of power in a failed attempt to stifle murder...
An historical look at two other famous trials in recent Communist Party history: the Gang of Four trial after the Cultural Revolution, and the corruption trials of Chen Xitong and Chen Liangyu which bears greater resemblance to the Bo Xilai case...
Defiant princeling Bo Xilai is likely to appeal against the verdict and sentence a Jinan court hands down today (9/22) in his trial for bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power, sources with direct knowledge of the case say....
The National Audit Office’s investigation of 45 counties in nine provinces and municipalities from 2009-12 found 1.6 billion yuan ($260 million) in fines had been given out in contravention of the rules, Chinese newspapers said....
Corruption involving the country’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has hogged the headlines. So far, senior executives at China National Petroleum Corp. have been sacked, former railways officials have been hauled to court and, most recently, news...
The Jinan Intermediate People’s Court announced Wednesday that it will deliver the verdict on former secretary of the Chongqing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (C.P.C.) Bo Xilai’s case at 10 a.m. on Sept. 22....
Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei refused to say whether a United Nations report into a sarin gas attack in Syria showed that government forces had used the banned weapons.
This morning, a Chinese street vendor named Xia Junfeng was executed. Xia had been found guilty of murdering two urban enforcers, known colloquially as chengguan, in 2009. Xia’s lawyers argued he acted in self-defense,...
Beijing’s anti-corruption campaign against public intellectuals and corrupt officials—while widely heralded by the official Chinese media—seems like one destined for short-term gain but long-term pain.
Though often described with foreboding buzzwords such as “The Great Firewall” and the “censorship regime,” Internet regulation in China is rarely either obvious or straightforward. This was the inspiration for China specialist Jason Q. Ng to write an innovative computer script that would make it possible to deduce just which terms are suppressed on China’s most important social media site, Sina Weibo.
The latest barrage from the government in China’s ongoing war on rumors is a Supreme Court document that announces any post “clicked and viewed more than 5000 times, or reposted more than 500 times” will be considered serious defamation. ...
