What Do Investigative Reporters Do?
With the recent Chen Yongzhou scandal, many have called for an “investigation” into the investigative reporting...
China to Move Slowly on One-Child Law Reform
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.
China to Ease Longtime Policy of 1-Child Limit
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.
China Unveils Boldest Reforms in Decades, Shows Xi in Command
China has relaxed its longstanding one-child policy and further freed up the markets in order to...
China’s Communists Want Unattainable Goal of Affluence Without Freedom
The upcoming meetings on economic reform are a chance for China to break free of the "middle income trap", the fate of countless states in Latin America and around the world which all failed to make the switch in time to a grown-up growth...
Daoism for the Action-Oriented
from Sinica Podcast{vertical_photo_right}
What Would Confucius Do? What for that matter would Laozi not do? This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy ask these and other questions of Sam Crane, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Politics at Williams College and...
Activists Challenge Beijing by Going to Dinner
On the last weekend of every month, government critics gather for unassuming meals in as many as 20 cities across the country to discuss issues from failures in the legal system to unequal access to education.
China’s Communist Party HQ Hit by Series of Explosions
Media reports claimed that improvised explosive devices packed with metal ball bearings and nails and concealed in roadside flowerbeds were detonated at around 7:40 in the morning in Taiyuan, the capital of coal-rich Shanxi province....
Explosions Kill 1, Injure 8 in North China City
The official Xinhua news agency said what appeared to be small-scale bombs went off outside an office building of the Shanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party. Taiyuan is the capital of Shanxi province.
How China Profits From Our Junk
The son and grandson of scrap metalists, reporter Adam Minter traveled throughout the world to investigate how what we discard—and reuse—helps drive the global economy.
China Story Yearbook 2013: Civilising China
“China Story Yearbook 2013” contains a rich range of translated material from Chinese sources related to politics, social change, urban transformation, law and order, international relations, the economy, the Internet, major news stories...
Another Massive Photoshop Fail in China
Social media in China lit up with mockery another obviously doctored image, this time posted on the Ninguo, Anhui government website, purporting to show vice-mayor Wang Hun pay a friendly visit to an elderly woman.
China’s State Media Calls for Strong Action on Tiananmen Attack
Chinese state media demanded severe punishment on October 31 after the government blamed militants from restive Xinjiang for an attack in Tiananmen Square, as the exiled leader of the region’s Uighur minority called for an independent probe...
Chinese Police Hunt for Two Xinjiang Men After Tiananmen Crash
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.
Police Examine Possible Xinjiang Link in Deadly Tiananmen Crash
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. ...
Jeep Crash in China’s Tiananmen Square Leaves Five Dead
Authorities have blamed separatist groups for stirring up trouble, but exiles and human right groups argue that the government has been too quick to identify violent incidents as the work of terrorists.
Wikipedia China Becomes Front Line for Views on Language and Culture
The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia has become more than an online encyclopedia: it is a battlefield for editors from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a region charged with political, ideological and cultural differences....
Unhinged in China
“A Touch of Sin” is made up of four interlocking stories that are meant to encompass the geographic sweep of China, and what director Jia Zhangke sees as the epidemic of violence and amorality in modern Chinese life.
Chinese University Defends Outspoken Teacher’s Firing
In the week since Professor Xia Yeliang was dismissed, university officials have been buffeted by criticism that their decision was in retaliation for his activism against the government.
After Party Headquarters Explosions, Netizens Debate Value of Violence
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...
How to Deal with the Chinese Police
from New York Review of BooksA 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...
The Birth of Chinese Feminism
He-Yin Zhen (ca. 1884-ca.1920) was a theorist who figured centrally in the birth of Chinese feminism. Unlike her contemporaries, she was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global historical problems. This volume, the first translation and study of He-Yin’s work in English, critically reconstructs early twentieth-century Chinese feminist thought in a transnational context by juxtaposing He-Yin Zhen’s writing against works by two better-known male interlocutors of her time.
Sex Ed Videos Go Viral
A collection of sex education videos have just gone, ahem, viral on the Chinese Internet. On October 29, a three-person team calling itself the “Nutcracker Studio” released three...
The Challenges of Conveying Absurd Reality: An Interview with Yu Hua
Thus, Los Angeles Review of Books Asia Co-editor Megan Shank and Yu exchanged Chinese-language e-mails about history’s most over- and underrated Chinese writers, the evolution of an ancient language and why Yu will never read Anna Karenina ...
Terrorism in Tiananmen, Politics at Peking University
from Sinica PodcastThis 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...
Small Part, Big Screen
Every morning outside the imposing gate of the Beijing Film Studio, a throng gathers to try to find a way inside. These aren’t fans, exactly. Look at their faces, the practiced way they crane their necks or square their shoulders when the man...
Tiananmen Attack Spotlights China’s Beleaguered Uighurs
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...
Why “2 Broke Girls” Is All the Rage in China
In China’s battle between cupcakes and...
Chinese Literature in Translation
from Sinica PodcastThis week, Sinica is delighted to be joined by Linda Jaivin and Alice Liu for a discussion on Chinese literature in translation. As many listeners will know, Linda is a long-standing force in the Chinese literary community and the author of many...
Mixed Marriages in China a Labour of Love
In 1978, there was not a single inter-racial marriage registered in mainland China, according to government figures. But the numbers of Chinese marrying foreigners has gradually risen, with 53,000 such couples tying the knot in...
In China, ‘Everyone is Guilty of Corruption’
Much as I appreciate our president’s determination in his fight against corruption, his battle feels like an attempt to “put out a big fire with a glass of water,” given how corruption has reached every corner of our society....
Newspaper Publishes Front-Page Call for Journalist’s Release
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....
To Live and Die in Ordos
This film is a character study of a socially responsible cop in a get-rich-quick modern bordertown whose life conveniently sums up the social and ethical tensions through which the whole country has been going during the past decade or so...
Unhinged in China
from New York Review of BooksIn one of the central scenes in Jia Zhangke’s new film, a young man working in the southern Chinese manufacturing city of Dongguan goes to an ATM and finds that he’s broke. He’s just spent the past month betraying his friends and hopping from job...
The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon
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.
China: “Capitulate or Things Will Get Worse”
from New York Review of BooksThe 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...
How to Say ‘Truthiness’ in Chinese
In the face of recent policies assaulting their right to speak out on the internet, grassroots Chinese are trying to turn the mirror back on officialdom by calling out instances where officials or state-owned media made statements that...
China’s Silly War on Starbucks Lattes
A C.C.T.V. investigation into Starbucks’ jacked-up prices in Mainland China has backfired, prompting many netizens to ask why the television station doesn’t cover more widespread and egregious injustices.
Chinese Regulators Restrict Imports of T.V. Formats
The new order is aimed at pushing domestically produced and “morality-building programs,” in line with the recent campaign to decrease vulgarity on Chinese T.V. The vacated slots will have to be filled with news, education programs and...
Robbed in China? Remain Calm and Call a Foreigner
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.
Top Chinese University Expels Outspoken Economist
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-...
The Labor Shortage That Could End China’s Economic Boom
Based on its track record, the purely economic dimensions of an economic transition don’t seem more daunting than the other feats the C.C.P. has pulled off. Instead, it’s the social and political dimensions of the demographic hangover that...
China Holds Two Bloggers As It Expands Crackdown on Rumors
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.
What China Thinks of the Shutdown
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...
Trust Issues: Hong Kong Resists Beijing’s Advances
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,...
Former Google China Chief Faces Online Attacks
Major Chinese Internet portals have republished an essay from an official media website that implies that Kai-fu Lee lied about being diagnosed with cancer, in what some of his supporters are calling a coordinated ad hominem effort to...
5 Things About China’s New Aged-Care Law
The changes in the law in China reflect an increasingly urgent dilemma across the world: As populations age faster than ever before, families and governments are struggling to decide who will protect and provide for the old. Too often, the...
‘Where Are the Riots?’: China Watches the Shutdown
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...
The World’s Most Active Twitter Country?
In terms of active Twitter users (defined as those “who used or contributed to the platform at least once a month”), the country with the most users was China, with 35.5 million, even though Chinese netizens are restricted from using...
Parents Bribe to Get Students into Top Schools, Despite Campaign Against Corruption
Almost everything, from admission to grades to teacher recommendations, is negotiable in Chinese schools if you know the right person or have enough cash, a fact that's worsening rather than mending the vast gap between the elite and...
Li Tianyi Sentencing Is Small Step for Chinese Women
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...
Old Dreams for a New China
from New York Review of BooksEver since China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, first uttered the phrase “China Dream” last year, people in China and abroad have been scrambling to decipher its meaning. Many nations have “dreams”; in Canada, the country’s most prominent popular...
How Social Media Complicates the Role of China’s Rights Lawyers
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...
Congressional-Executive Commission on China: 2013 Annual Report
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...
Chinese Police Shoot Dead Seven Uighurs in Kashgar
Four died after police in Yarkand county, which is administered by the Silk Road city of Kashgar, opened fire on a group of Uighurs in a private residence on October 3 after suspecting them of “illegal assembly,” the Munich-based World...