Directive from the Ministry of Truth to media: “New Express reporter Chen Yongzhou accepted bribes to publish a number of inaccurate reports. The media must use the full text of Xinhua News Agency wire copy regarding this incident, no...
Chinese police are hunting for two or more men from the troubled region of Xinjiang amid growing suspicion that a fatal car crash and explosion in Tiananmen Square on Monday was a suicide attack.
After the car crash in Tiananmen Square, Chinese authorities have now named two suspects from Xinjiang, the troubled western region whose ethnic Uighur population has become increasingly disenchanted with Chinese policies. ...
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...
On the morning of November 6, an unknown assailant or group of assailants reportedly detonated several bombs outside the front door of the provincial government headquarters of...
Stop being a bully, and start respecting the rule of the global village. That’s the takeaway from a November 1 editorial...
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...
This week on Sinica, we return to our China roots with a show covering recent developments in the news including the recent terrorist attack in Beijing and political hiring-and-firing at Peking University. Joining Kaiser and Jeremy to talk about...
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...
China’s economy is already two-thirds the size of the economy of the U.S., and it’s been growing five times as fast. But now, China’s economy is beginning to slow and is facing a raft of difficult problems. If China’s leaders don’t address these...
On October 28, a jeep plowed into a group of pedestrians and burst into flames on the avenue next to Tiananmen Square, the massive public square in Beijing that is the symbolic heart of the Chinese capital. According to Chinese state media...
China is rising. But how should the West—and the United States in particular—respond? This could be the key geopolitical question of the twenty-first century, according to strategic expert Hugh White, with huge implications for the future security and prosperity of the West as a whole. The China Choice confronts this fundamental question, considering the options for the Asian century ahead.
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...
Nearly everything you know about China is wrong! Yes, within a decade, China will have the world’s largest economy. But that is the least important thing to know about China. In this enlightening book, two of the world’s leading China experts turn the conventional wisdom on its head, showing why China’s economic growth will constrain rather than empower it.
The arrest of a journalist for allegedly damaging the reputation of an equipment manufacturer has...
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying responded to a media report that the Japanese Foreign Ministry have released a video online claiming sovereignty over the Diaoyu Islands.
To understand how Second Thomas Shoal could become contested ground is to enter into a morass of competing historical, territorial and even moral claims in an area where defining what is true or fair may be no easier than it has proved to...
Following are ChinaFile Conversation participants’ reactions to “China: Superpower or Superbust?” in the November-December issue of...
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,...
Over the years, China Digital Times (CDT) has collected hundreds of words and turns of phrase invented by China’s citizens of the Internet, its “netizenry.” Playfully evading online censors, netizens have created a world of “grass-mud horses” and “river crabs,” forever locked in battle in the “Mahler Desert.” CDT’s Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is a collection of politically-charged terms which represent netizen resistance discourse.
The massacre of protesters in Beijing on June 4, 1989, and the harsh repression during the months immediately following put China into a foul mood. Among ordinary Chinese, the prestige of the Communist Party, whose leaders had ordered the brutal...
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...
Peking School of Economics’ Xia Yeliang was expelled for his political views and activism, including his vocal support of democracy, his involvement in the drafting of Charter 08, and his refusal to comply with government directives to de-...
This report provides a survey of the phenomenon of censorship and its recent evolution as it pertains to the news media sector, though similar dynamics also affect the film, literature, and performing arts industries. Specifically, this report...
China Central Television has come a long ways since its founding as a domestic party propaganda outlet in 1958. The domestic service has been supplemented by an international service, boasting three major global offices in Beijing, Washington,...
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...
The Shanghai Free Trade Zone was recently launched. The measure is commonly regarded as an attempt by the leadership of the Communist Party to further economic reform, which has slowed over the past decade. It is also part of what policymakers...
Exiled sculptor Wang Keping’s controversial piece “Silence” — a wooden head with a plug stuffing its gaping mouth — has not been allowed in China since it was shown in 1979 and 1980, but the artist is now showing newer art in Beijing. ...
China has become shrill in its criticism of the fiscal train wreck in the United States, arguing that the answer to a potential government default is to begin creating a “de-Americanized world.”
The notion of a government shutdown is strange for the average Chinese person because its consequences in the People’s Republic would go far beyond closed federal agencies and parks, but it has also helped the Chinese better understand the...
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...
When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, expectations were high—in Beijing and among the pro-mainland forces in Hong Kong—that identification with the Chinese nation would slowly but surely strengthen among the local population,...
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.
In China’s social media - what amounts to China’s largest and most liberal classroom - microbloggers are taking the opportunity to teach one another the difference between federal and local authority in America and the protections, and...
We can calm down on the threat to "de-Americanize". The fact that China is so rightly panicked about the possibility of a U.S. default just goes to show that Beijing knows it is, and will long continue to be, reliant on a U.S.-dominated...
A recent op-ed piece published on Xinhua challenges America’s placement at the center of global matters, suggesting reforms in the world’s international economic and political organizations so that it may avoid America’s negative influences.
A Chinese cartel has come to control 100% of the Vitamin C that is contained in foods found in American supermarkets, an unprecedented circumstance which will have political and economic ramifications in the near future.
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...
No one wants the United States to stay away from East Asia -- but if it can't manage the task, perhaps it should stay focused on the problems within its own borders.
The Commission notes China’s lack of progress in guaranteeing Chinese citizens’ freedom of expression, assembly, and religion; restraining the power of the Chinese Communist Party; and establishing the rule of law under the new leadership of...
While China’s new leader has won praise at home for his aggressiveness in pushing China’s interests abroad, this is one situation in which his boldness was bound to backfire. As bad as the Fonterra scandal appeared, China’s own dairy...
Last week as the U.S. Federal Government shut down, President Obama canceled his planned trip to Indonesia and Brunei, where he was to have attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Bali. Some foreign policy analysts have...
President Obama’s cancelled trip to Asia makes a mockery of the “pivot” or rebalancing to that part of the world and away from the Middle East, which was the big strategic theme of Obama’s foreign policy. The result is that small countries in the...
After walking several blocks through New York's busy streets recently, I finally found Wang Juntao in the middle of Times Square, where the exiled Chinese dissident was holding a sit-down protest.
Secretary of State John Kerry replaced President Obama at the opening of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, leaving China’s president, Xi Jinping, as the dominant leader...
Critics both within and without China have suggested that Xi Jinping’s promotion of self-criticism by Communist Party cadres has at least two motives: it promotes the appearance of concern with lax discipline while avoiding deeper reform, and it...
President Obama’s decision to shorten, then ultimately cancel, a trip to Asia this weekend may be good news for his Chinese counterpart, who is striving to charm a region unnerved by China’s aggressive stance over territory....
The re-emergence of Quotations from Chairman Mao comes amid an official revival of the era’s rhetoric. Xi Jinping has embraced Maoist terminology and concepts, launching a “mass line rectification campaign” and even presiding over a...
A city in eastern China has spent 70m yuan (£7.1m) on building a giant bronze statue of a puffer fish, drawing accusations of graft and profligate state spending.
Nineteen province-level governments in China collected a total of $2.7 billion in fines last year from parents who had violated family planning laws, which usually limit couples to one child, a lawyer who had requested the data said....
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...
