High school senior Henry DeGroot was visiting a school outside Beijing on a semester abroad this year when he decided to make a point by writing prodemocracy messages in the notebook of a Chinese student.
This week on Sinica, we're delighted to be joined by Thomas Talhelm, Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of a recent paper proposing a...
Every spring, an old friend of mine named Xu Jue makes a trip to the Babaoshan cemetery in the western suburbs of Beijing to lay flowers on the tombs of her dead son and husband. She always plans her visit for April 5, which is the holiday of...
Hong Kong is the only place on Chinese soil where large public commemorations of the Tiananmen massacre take place; elsewhere memorials of the June 4th crackdown remain strictly forbidden.
After the democracy protests were crushed in 1989, many thought China would turn inward. Instead, a million Chinese citizens moved to Africa. Howard French discusses his book China's Second Continent.
Blocked on Weibo is one of the most interesting websites on the internet: A list that explains the search terms that are censored on China’s massive microblogging site Weibo.
Today, the United States is asking of the Chinese government what we have asked for 25 years: to provide the fullest possible accounting of the Tiananmen events and to stop retribution against those who wish to remember them.
A quarter century after democracy protests ended in bloodshed, Chinese still clamor for clean government and courts.
Cardinal Joseph Zen of the Catholic Church, a longtime advocate of greater democracy in Hong Kong and mainland China, attended the annual candlelight vigil for Tiananmen Square victims for the first time in Hong Kong on Wednesday evening.
Barack Obama reminds Poles that while they voted for democracy twenty-five years ago this day, China crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
In the quarter-century since the crackdown in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, China's economy has thrived and presented the world with an historic milestone. But at what cost to its people?
Twenty-five years ago on Wednesday, the Chinese government, acting under martial law, deployed 200,000 troops into Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Today, technology and globalism are prying open the lives of China’s people. But, in matters of politics and history, the Party is determined to silence even the “few flies” that Deng Xiaoping once described as a bearable side effect of an...
Tens of thousands of people held a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong to mark the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters 25 years ago in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, while mainland China authorities sought to whitewash the event.
Every year, political activists try to commemorate those who died in the 1989 crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese government tries to prevent them, a cat-and-mouse game as classic as "Tom and Jerry."
To my generation, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades.
Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.”
My father knew what he was talking about. His courage had been broken, by countless political...
The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
In a stunning rebuke to his superiors, Major General Xu Qinxian said the Tiananmen protests were a political problem and should be settled through negotiations, not force.
While China's economy, society and cities have transformed in the last 25 years, Tiananmen demonstrators and their supporters are keen to remind the world that other things haven't changed.
This year, China will very likely overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. It has certainly become wealthy. But it has also become less free.
The Global Times, China’s state-run nationalist-leaning newspaper, later challenged that view, asking, “America wants to lead the world for another 100 years, but with what?”
As the global travel industry rolls out the welcome mat for China's surge of outbound tourists, it should consider tipping the scales in their customers' favor.
China's health officials are taking steps to accommodate two million more births annually after a landmark decision last year to relax population controls.
Those three letters are B, A, and D.
Chinese authorities have deported scores of foreign models whom they detained earlier this month in Beijing on accusations that the models were working illegally, said a model who once worked in China.
When a child scores 99 on a test, an American parent will lavish praise. But a Chinese parent will say: “What happened? Why didn’t you get 100?”
From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.
Assailants in two SUVs plowed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in China's volatile northwestern region of Xinjiang, killing 31 people and injuring more than 90, local officials said.
The number of tourist departures from China hit a whopping 97.3 million in 2013, up more than nine fold from 2000, according to the Germany-based China Outbound Tourism Research Institute
On May 18, Hong Lei, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said China “will suspend some of its plans for bilateral exchanges with Vietnam in response to the deadly violence against Chinese nationals in the country,”...
Twenty-five years ago to the day I write this, I watched and listened as thousands of Chinese citizens in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square dared to condemn their leaders. Some shouted “Premier Li Peng resign.” Even braver ones cried “Down with Deng...
Over the past two months, the relationship between China’s estimated 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people, most of whom follow some form of Sunni Islam,...
Suicide has been an increasing problem in China, with state media calling it the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 34...
On May 3, fifteen Beijing citizens—scholars, journalists, and rights lawyers—gathered informally at the home of Professor Hao Jian of the Beijing Film Academy to reflect on the 25th anniversary of the 1989 June Fourth massacre in Beijing. Two...
In this show: dating tips for hooking up with your Marxist-Leninist thought instructor, advice on what modern music and seasonal vegetables to smuggle in from Hong Kong, the origins of China’s somewhat unorthodox driving customs, and instructions...
The U.S.-based World Bank grabbed everybody’s attention by announcing that China was poised to displace the United States as the world’s largest economy based on purchasing power. But a survey of the Chinese web shows people at home aren’t buying...
A single man slashed people outside a Guangzhou railway station. An armed police officer fired at and wounded the attacker, helping authorities capture the perpetrator.
Survey of China's 'post-80s' generation finds high pay tied to official status inside the Chinese Communist Party.
This week on Sinica, Jeremy Goldkorn is pleased to be joined by two people navigating the English-language publishing industry as it involves China: Alice Xin Liu, Editor of Pathlight magazine, and Karen Ma, first-time author of the well...
It’s a plot twist few saw coming. Not long ago, China’s video streaming sites were trying to clean up years of copyright violations by...
The privetely funded, wordless, loosely plotted "PANDA!" is China's latest soft power incarnate.
The income gap between the rich and poor in China has surpassed that of the U.S. and is among the widest in the world, a report showed, adding to the challenges for President Xi Jinping as growth slows.
By the end of 2013, two years before deadline, China already exceeded its goal, tallying a total of 4,000 museums.
Class is a sensitive word in China. Marxist-Leninist rhetoric like “class enemies,” “class conflict,” and “class struggle” are rarely seen in the country’s media these days, but since China began its market reforms in 1979, stratification has...
Xiaomi’s Mi3 in China is cheaper than the iPhone 5c—1,999 yuan versus 4,488. No wonder Xiaomi outsells Apple, shipping 7.3 million phones in the fourth quarter of last year over Apple's 7 million.
Many Chinese buyers are switching their interest away from markets like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore amid fears that prices have soared to frothy levels in those cities.
Arming regular beat patrols is a significant policy change for a nation with some of the world’s most restrictive gun laws.
China’s Internet is vast, with millions of sites and more than 618 million users. But nested within that universe is a tiny...
Since Xi Jinping became president of China, there has been a sustained crackdown on advocates of democracy and civil society. A couple hundred Chinese citizens have been arrested and tried or await trial. Lawyer and activist ...
China likely already has more Protestants—an estimated 58 million—than South Africa or Brazil, major centers of evangelical revival, and 67 million...
This week we’re delighted to be joined by Christopher Beam, author of the passage quoted above, which we unceremoniously filched from his fantastic New Republic essay about his year with the Chongqing Dockers, one of the many new amateur football...
