Sinosphere represents The Times’s latest attempt to overcome the challenges of getting a good handle on what’s happening in China by delivering timely, informative, engaging dispatches on everything their correspondents find “Interesting...
As fears mounted this week about a possible (and now, it seems, averted) U.S. government default,...
Bill Bishop:
The D.C. dysfunction puts China in a difficult place. Any financial markets turmoil that occurs because of a failure of Congress to do its job could harm China’s economy, and especially its exports. The accumulation...
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...
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...
Following is a transcript of the network news broadcast of China Central Television on September 30, 2013:
央视网消息(新闻联播)： 9月30日上午，在中华人民共和国64周年国庆前夕，...
Do-it-yourself hubs are giving a boost to tinkerers and inventors.
The Beijing News says the monitors, described as Internet opinion analysts, are on state and commercial payrolls.
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...
On September 30 at Asia Society in New York City, film director and screenwriter Jia Zhangke and his wife, muse, and frequent leading lady on screen...
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....
As Hollywood and the booming Chinese film business have worked with increasing urgency to forge deeper ties and more mutual understanding over recent years, the Asia Society’s annual summit has emerged as a noteworthy networking occasion on...
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....
Jonathan Landreth:
Chinese writer and director Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin won the prize for the best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Though the dialogue and its fine translation and English subtitles by...
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,...
Joining Kaiser and Jeremy this week are David Wertime and Rachel Lu from Tea Leaf Nation, along with Paul Mozur from The Wall Street Journal. And our topic? None other than the...
Worried about its hold on public opinion, the Chinese government has pursued a propaganda and police offensive against what it calls malicious rumor-mongering online.
Recent months have been rocky for the Middle East: harsh crackdowns on protesters in Egypt and a Rashomon-like scenario in which the Syrian government and the...
China’s age of retirement has long been a subject of controversy, as the country’s aging population and slowing economic growth have made caring for the elderly an increasingly daunting task. Recently, Yang Yansui, a professor at China’s...
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.
King has just completed two studies that peer into the Chinese censorship machine — including a field experiment within China that was conducted with extraordinary secrecy. The studies refute popular intuitions about what Chinese censors...
Western media organizations are trying to demonize China and promote revolution and national disintegration as they hate seeing the country prosper, the head of China’s official Xinhua news agency said in comments published on Wednesday....
Chen Weihua:
Chinese truly believe that there is no military solution to the Syrian crisis. On the contrary, a U.S. air strike would only worsen the situation there. Chinese have seen many failures of U.S. intervention in...
Can it have been merely a few weeks ago that we sequestered Evan “The Turncoat” Osnos in our studio and grilled the celebrated writer on his decision to leave China for what must have myopically seemed like greener pastures? At the time, we...
After wrangling with the authorities all day August 25, on what was supposed to be the opening of the festival on the rural outskirts of Beijing, this year’s Beijing Independent Film Festival has been cancelled.
Orville Schell:
It is true that China is no longer beset by threats of foreign incursion nor is it a laggard in the world of economic development and trade. But being there and being steeped in an atmosphere of seemingly endless...
Like the recent trial of Bo Xilai, the fallen former politician, the case has become an intensely watched and debated parable about the privileges and limited accountability of the Communist Party’s highborn.
When Xu Zhiyong and I received the “Ten People in Rule of Law in 2003” award at CCTV, neither of us, nor the two sponsors of the event would have thought that, in a few years, the two of us would become “the enemies of the state.”...
The recent uptick in government pressure on popular online pundits was evident as the Communist Party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily weighed in with a sharply worded commentary demanding users with huge followings act in the “national interest...
There is a Chinese proverb that says one must kill a chicken to scare the monkeys, which means to punish someone in order to make an example out of them. That is what many believe happened last Sunday when outspoken investor and Internet...
The just-concluded trial of former Communist Party boss Bo Xilai was unprecedented in opening up a high-profile legal proceeding to public scrutiny, says legal scholar Jerome A. Cohen.
The nation’s 307,000 reporters, producers and editors will soon have to sit through at least two days of Marxism classes, the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department has announced along with the press association and the state press...
Ai Weiwei’s commentary on the twisted courtroom drama provided by the trial of Bo Xilai and what implications it holds for the future of “rule of law” in China, both for citizens and officials of all ranks.
When asked to give examples of China's transformation over the last three decades, you may first be tempted to cite year-to-year G.D.P. growth figures. Yet in 2013, we may also find some of these answers tucked inside a Fodor's People's...
By allowing the ousted politician to have a say at all, and by releasing portions of the daily transcript the Party has highlighted its progressiveness and successfully deflected attention from the theatrical nature of a masterfully...
Run down the list of the “Seven Base Lines” and it is painfully obvious that this is part of a new government initiative to assert stronger control over online speech. This is yet another internet tightening in China ostensibly carried out...
Directors, jury and invited guests who had come from as far as Sweden were told the 10th Beijing Independent Film Festival were threatened with power cuts and the arrest of Wang Hongwei if they persisted in holding the festival.
Beijing managed to keep much of the Bo saga - and the elite machinations that precipitated it - from the foreign press. As humbling as it may be to admit, we know very little about what goes on at the highest levels of Chinese politics....
The courtroom spectacle is an effort by the party to convince Bo’s elite party allies and ordinary supporters that he had his say in court, and that the long prison sentence he is expected to get is based on evidence of crimes committed, not...
Day one of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai’s trial on charges of bribery, corruption, and abusing his power has come to an end. For those who didn’t spend last night glued to their devices, here’s what you missed.
The court at which disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai is being tried has taken the unprecedented step of posting live updates of his trial on Sina weibo, one of China’s Twitter-like microblogs.
CNEX, a nonprofit, has unique connections in the Chinese Communist Party which help insulate budding documentarians from undue interference so they can film and release films on a broader array of issues.
In 1980, the Gang of Four trial was widely mocked in the West as a political show trial in which Deng Xiaoping purged his enemies. While there are many differences between that trial and Bo’s it is the long ago trial that is likely to prove...
If you’re a China correspondent, you’re likely in Jinan, Shandong province right now, where disgraced former Chongqing Party Chief Bo Xilai, 64, will stand open trial for corruption tomorrow at the Jinan Intermediate People’s Court....
The Communist Party and its mouthpieces will celebrate the decisiveness of the Bo Xilai verdict as proof that the party - and the courts it controls - won’t tolerate corruption in its ranks. But who will believe this?...
Bo Guagua released to The New York Times on August 19. Mr. Bo’s father, Bo Xilai, a former Chinese Communist Party official, is scheduled to go on trial on August 22 on charges of taking bribes, corruption and abuse of power.
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The speed with which Mr Xi has moved to establish his conservative ideological credentials, having at first struck a somewhat more liberal tone, has still been a surprise to some observers.
Communist Party cadres have filled meeting halls around China to hear a somber, secretive warning issued by senior leaders. Power could escape their grip, they have been told, unless the party eradicates seven subversive currents coursing...
The men’s room in the passenger station in Qujing, Yunnan province will be familiar to anyone who has answered the call of nature in one of China’s provincial bus stations. Dim fluorescent lights give a clinical blue pallor to the bleary-eyed,...
The long-awaited trial of Bo who is still popular with conservatives and the disaffected, will be the country’s highest-profile hearing since the 1976 downfall of Mao Zedong’s widow, Jiang...
