Discrimination in employment, common across western Xinjian, is one of the many indignities China’s 10 million Uighurs face in a society that increasingly casts them as untrustworthy and prone to religious extremism.
Even if nothing interesting could be written about 99 percent of Beijing's approximately 20 million people, there would still be 200,000 great stories remaining.
“Before, if anything happened, any accident or disaster, the information can be withheld or contaminated by government media control; but now it’s impossible, almost, to withhold information,” Chao said at the Stanford University China 2.0...
A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, “A Touch of Sin” is at once monumental and human scale. A story of lives rocked by violence, it has the urgency of a screaming headline but one inscribed with emotional...
President Xi Jinping believes China is losing its moral compass and he wants the ruling Communist Party to be more tolerant of traditional faiths in the hope these will help fill a vacuum created by the country’s breakneck growth and rush...
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...
In the four years since her husband was arrested, Ms. Zhang, 39, has been transformed from a shy, self-described politically naïve peasant into an eloquent voice for the downtrodden.
China's swallowing up of Smithfield, a well-known U.S. povider of processed meats, illustrates two things about the country: its swelling economic power and growing hunger for meat-based diets. And the deal may foretell of many...
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....
Cao Shunli has not been seen since September 14, when she was barred from boarding a flight to Switzerland, Human Rights Watch says. Ms, Cao has advocated for the right of petitioners to contribute to China’s human rights reports....
Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has now been legalized inside a forthcoming free-trade zone within Shanghai, but the beachhead will likely remain just that, as it’s unlikely Facebook will be able to penetrate other regions or demographics...
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...
Thirteen knowledgeable academics trained in diverse disciplines and based around the world explore disquietude surrounding Chinese values and civic life in clusters of essays on “Legacies,” “A New Electronic Community,” “Values,” and “...
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...
Prominent Uighur rights advocate Ilham Tohti called the local government’s move an effort to “dilute the religious environment” in the area, where minority Uighurs often complain of ethnic and religious repression.
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....
Sheryl Sandberg’s brand of self-strengthening feminism has made its way to China, receiving mixed, but generally positive, reactions among various audiences.
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...
Authorities in China’s restive northwestern region of Xinjiang have shot dead up to a dozen Uyghurs and wounded 20 others in a raid on what they said was a “terrorist” facility, according to local officials and residents.
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The number of foreign-born Chinese Americans in the US doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to a UN report, and experts attribute the increase in large part to China’s growing middle class.
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.
They gawk, they shove, they eschew local cuisine, and last year, 83 million mainland Chinese spent $102 billion abroad making them the world’s biggest tourism spenders, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization....
All told, 1,202 foreigners received the equivalent of a Chinese “green card” — making them legal, permanent residents of the world’s No. 2 economy. The numbers, minuscule compared to U.S. immigration figures, are clearly on the rise....
Chinese authorities have increasingly been broadcasting interviews after big-name arrests, forcing suspects to confess publicly to alleged crimes prior to trial or conviction.
When Sina Weibo made filmmaker Jia Zhangke aware of just how many ordinary Chinese were being provoked by power-abusing members of society to commit acts of bloodshed, he decided to adapt his martial arts film to reflect the issues of the...
China’s Hou Yifan, age 19, is currently playing against Ukraine’s Anna Ushenina, 28, for the title of world female chess champion. Each player earns one point for a victory and a half-point for a draw, and, after four games, Ms. Hou leads 3...
A run-down of some of Sina Weibo’s most followed figures, complete with background information, a sampling of posts, and the type of content you ought to expect from them, from irreverant property developers to optimistic high-tech investors.
While Western media loves to trumpet its successes in China, with the strong showing of Hollywood blockbusters, it’s clear that China audiences aren’t just sitting and waiting for the next Hollywood blockbuster.
Apple stands to gain sales in China more than any other market from the cheaper offering thanks to the country’s huge number of low- and middle-income smartphone users. But in China the new iPhone quite frankly won’t be all that cheap....
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.
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...
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. ...
In the midst of it all, the Chinese people increasingly expect a different kind of relationship with their government – one of citizens and not subjects. They want their rights respected and their preferences heard.
Farmers are increasingly thrown off their land by officials eager to find new sources of economic growth. The tensions are especially acute on the edge of big Chinese cities, and more and more people are resorting to suicide to protest the...
China’s governing Communist Party has promoted Mandarin for decades to unite a nation with thousands of dialects and numerous minority languages, but that campaign has been hampered by resistance, the country’s size and lack of investment...
The now oft-derided Chinese Red Cross once again found itself in hot water in July, when it was reported that some...
When I moved to Beijing from New York in February to study Chinese, a question began to haunt me: Could Beijing’s air in 2013 be more dangerous than the toxic brew produced by the 9/11 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center, which hung...
In contrary to the traditional Chinese female image of a cute, submissive and clinging lady, nü han zi is tough enough to take care of herself without a man.
In the U.S.A., there’s a tension between the self that is invented and the self that is inherited,” Chinese-American writer Gish Jen said. “But in China, it’s 20 percent of one and 80 percent of another,” whereas in America, “it’s the...
For recent college graduates strugglgin to find a job, positions inside the government, the state enterprises and state banks, which offer steady incomes and generous benefits, have increased dramatically in their appeal.
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Professor Zhang Xuezhong of East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai published an article entitled “The Origin and Perils of the Anti-constitutionalism Campaign in 2013″. On August 17, Zhang was notified that his teaching...
Tolerance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals appears to be rising in Mainland China, at least among the digital generations. A February 2013 poll of users on Sina Weibo, one of China’s leading social networking...
When debating China’s one-child policy, China’s domestic media and observers overseas mostly focus on its impact on the population structure or incidences of inhumanity involved in the implementation of the policy (such as...
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...
Wen Yunchao, who has been monitoring arrests and convictions in this year in China from New York City, insists his records show a growing trend of repression under Xi Jinping.
Although the cancellation of the opening screening on day one resulted in a weak turnout over the remaining days of the festival, it definitely relieved the tension from the authorities, which helped all the screenings, discussions and...
With an estimated 48,000 to 50,000 new H.I.V./A.I.D.S. infections every year, Wu said the government aims to reduce new infections by 25 percent and H.I.V./A.I.D.S. mortality by 30 percent by the end of 2015.
The crackdown on Zhang Xuezhong is part of a broader stiffening of ideological control in the country’s universities as faculty and students grow skeptical of required courses in Communist ideology.
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.
For all of China’s vaunted influence in the world, many of its top leaders are deeply fearful of losing control of their own country. That fear is reflected in the Bo Xilai trial and the recently revealed “Document No. 9” warning of...
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.
In Confucian tradition, children and grandchildren have cared for the elderly, but with almost 200 million over-60 year olds, and a projection that sees that figure more than doubling in the next 40 years, China faces a deluge of infirm...
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...
