Buy, Sell, Adopt: Child Trafficking in China
In the past two and a half years, according to government statistics, some 54,000 children have been rescued from traffickers.
China's Anti-Corruption Tool Kit: No Flowers, Expensive Booze or 'Empty Talk'
China's new leadership has made combating the country’s endemic corruption one of its publicly stated missions.
Food For Thought
Food companies play an ambivalent part in the fight against flab. China's packaged food sales are 3-4 times their 2002 level.
The NYRB China Archive
12.21.12
Beijing’s Doomsday Problem
from New York Review of BooksOver the past ten days, China has been riveted by accounts of what authorities say are its very own doomsday cult: the church of Almighty God, which has prophesized that the world will end today. Authorities have said the group staged illegal...
The NYRB China Archive
12.20.12
The New Chinese Gang of Seven
from New York Review of BooksIn traditional Chinese religion, a fashi, or ritual master, will recite a set of phrases to turn an ordinary space into a sacred area where the gods can descend to receive prayers and rejuvenate the community. The ceremony can last days...
The Top 10 Chinese Internet Memes of 2012
2012 saw social media supercharg one of contemporary China’s finest forms of cultural and political expression: the Internet meme.
Infographics
12.19.12
A Comparison of China’s and America’s Richest People
CNPolitics, a Chinese-language news website,...
Features
12.18.12
College Graduates Compete for Jobs Sweeping Streets
from TabletTong Peng spent six months discovering his bachelor’s degree was “worthless” before deciding to apply for a job as a street sweeper.
He graduated from college in Harbin in June, 2012, not expecting to find it so tough to find work with a...
Books
12.17.12
Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged
Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged examines the twenty-year aftermath of the 1989 assaults on established, state-sponsored socialism in the former Soviet bloc and in China. Editors Nina Bandelj and Dorothy J. Solinger bring together prominent experts on Eastern Europe and China to examine the respective trajectories of political, economic, and social transformations that unfolded in these two areas, while also comparing the changes that ensued within the two regions.
Media
12.17.12
Media Effort to Emphasize Newtown Tragedy Backfires in Blogosphere
Tragedy can strike anywhere. Mere hours before the horrific shooting at an American school in Newtown, Connecticut that left twenty-eight people dead, including twenty children, a horrific school attack also happened in China. At an elementary...
China Watches Newtown: Guns and American Credibility
Authoritarian states ward off calls for political freedoms arguing that U.S.-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy.
Caixin Media
12.16.12
Mobile Phones Souring Africa’s Image of China
Every day, about a dozen mobile phone wholesalers field orders and manufacturer offers from offices inside a nondescript, five-story building on Luthuli Avenue in downtown Nairobi.
The building doesn’t look like a hub for global commerce,...
Rectification of Names, 鸿海 Division
Now you might be thinking: Oh, no! Another Chinese company whose name I have to remember and that I have to care about. Calm down. As people who operate in China know, and as one "by the way" clause in the story points out, Hon Hai Precision...
Media
12.12.12
The “Chinese Dream” Means One Thing to its Leaders, and Another to its People
Since China unveiled the new Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the country’s Web users have been paying close attention to the new elite group of leaders who will set the country’s agenda...
In the People’s Liberation Army
Mo Yan, recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, describes an experience in the People's Liberation Army in the 1970s. This text is excerpted from his part fiction, part memoir Change.
China Reportedly Strips Shanghai Bishop of His Title
A Roman Catholic bishop who stunned congregants and Communist Party officials last July when he renounced his government position during his consecration has been stripped of his religious title, according to two Catholic Web sites that cited...
The “Just Sisters” Defense: China’s Sex-Scandal Surge
Faced with a sex scandal of breathtaking tackiness, a Chinese police district could be forgiven for feeling perhaps a flicker of relief last week when someone in the office stumbled on what must have felt like good news under the circumstances—a...
Culture
12.11.12
Sheng Keyi on Mo Yan: “Literature Supersedes Politics and Everything Else”
In a recent conversation at the Asia Society, novelist Sheng Keyi said she felt the critism of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize was unjustified. The...
Culture
12.11.12
Yu Jie: Awarding Mo Yan the Nobel Prize Was a “Huge Mistake”
Mo Yan accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm on December 10.
The 57-year-old novelist often writes stories based on memories of his village childhood, and his work and his political views have triggered wide debate. ...
Out of School
12.11.12
What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong
When Chinese novelist Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this week, the relationship between literature and politics attracted much attention. The...
Keep Smiling! – You’re Being Watched
Frequent media reports of overwhelming popular support for mass surveillance are propagandistic in tone and content. However, is there nonetheless some truth in the ‘happy Chinese panopticon’? An international comparative survey on privacy and...
Chinese Survey Shows a Higher Jobless Rate
A new survey shows that the real unemployment rate in China is double the official level, and layoffs rose sharply among migrant workers in the past year, underlining a challenge for China's new leaders to maintain growth. The survey of 8,000...
Media
12.09.12
New Leaders’ Common Touch Gives Netizens “Great Hope”
Glad-handing with the locals. Kissing babies. Eating fast food. These are tried and true ways that American politicians seek to advertise their common touch; but when China’s new leaders employ these methods, it is greeted as a pleasant surprise...
Sinica Podcast
12.07.12
Time to Leave China?
from Sinica PodcastIt wasn’t very long ago that the Chinese blogosphere became engrossed with two near-simultaneous and very public posts by well-known expats marking their decisions to leave China for greener pastures. While grumbling about this country is nothing...
Detained China Nobel Wife Speaks Out
Liu Xia trembled uncontrollably and cried as she described how her confinement under house arrest has been absurd.
The NYRB China Archive
12.06.12
Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?
from New York Review of BooksOn October 11 Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2012 will go to the fifty-seven-year-old Chinese writer Guan Moye, better known as Mo Yan, a pen name that...
My First Trip
12.03.12
A China Frontier: Once the Border of Borders
In 1961, when I first arrived in Hong Kong as an aspiring young China scholar, there was something deeply seductive about the way this small British enclave of capitalism clung like a barnacle to the enormity of China’s socialist revolution....
Caixin Media
12.03.12
Toxic Effects and Environmental Nondisclosure
High-profile talk emphasizing environmental action at the Communist Party’s 18th national congress attracted a lot of attention. News from the November proceedings spurred industry demands for more information and pushed stock prices...
China Bans Rowdy Game Show After Mother's Rant about Turning her Daughter into 'Sexy Goddess' of China
China suspended a broadcaster after an unaired segment of a TV game show leaked online showing a shouting match with a woman who calls her daughter the next Lady Gaga.
Environment
11.28.12
Russia’s Siberian Dams Power “Electric Boilers” in Beijing
from chinadialogueThe underdeveloped, sparsely populated Eastern Siberia region that shares a 4,000-kilometer border with China has vast resources to offer its heavily populated and fast-developing neighbor. Hydroelectricity is key among them.
A major new...
How Ordinary Chinese Are Talking And Fighting Back
Roughly 400 million Chinese use Weibo, China's Twitter, and often do so to expose corruption.
Caixin Media
11.26.12
When Tradition is Flattened by Policy
A “tomb-flattening policy” in Henan province has sparked intense controversy, with millions of tombs reportedly destroyed by local authorities in a quest to turn graveyards into farmland.
The policy can be seen as a historical extension of...
Caixin Media
11.23.12
Asset Transparency Urged to Fight Government Graft
Calls for government officials to disclose personal and family assets are growing louder in China, mainly in reaction to the rising number of corruption cases affecting officialdom.
And some officials are listening. A local Communist Party...
The NYRB China Archive
11.22.12
China: Worse Than You Ever Imagined
from New York Review of BooksLast summer I took a trip to Xinyang, a rural area of wheat fields and tea plantations in central China’s Henan province. I met a pastor, a former political prisoner, and together we made a day trip to Rooster Mountain, a onetime summer retreat...
Women in China Leadership Fewer Than Under Mao
The chart of the day shows the falling percentage of women in the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee, a group of about 200 members that includes all seven men on the nation’s...
Corruption in China's Orphanages
One of my children is from an orphanage where the director, a government official, has created a nice little business in orphan homecomings, which include a lavish meal, hugs from the caregivers, and a shower of gifts for the returning child. The...
Media
11.19.12
A Conservative Commentator Calls Out Chinese Liberals, and Liberals Shout Back
Speech on the Chinese Internet, it seems, is beginning to thaw once more following the country’s leadership transition. After months of speculation, new Chinese leader Xi Jinping was announced on November 16 at the close of the 18th...
China, Are You Ready for Some American Football?
The NFL is hoping that American football’s flash could someday give basketball and soccer a run for their money in China.
Recording the Untold Stories of China’s Great Famine
A young man trudges doggedly around his village, notebook in hand, fringe flopping over his glasses. He goes from door to door, calling on the elderly.
The young man has one main question: Who died in our village during the Great Famine?...
Books
11.09.12
Strong Society, Smart State
The rise and influence of public opinion on Chinese foreign policy reveals a remarkable evolution in authoritarian responses to social turmoil. James Reilly shows how Chinese leaders have responded to popular demands for political participation with a sophisticated strategy of tolerance, responsiveness, persuasion, and repression—a successful approach that helps explain how and why the Communist Party continues to rule China.
In China, Paranoia Around Twitter Hackings
Activists, journalists and a political cartoonist had their Twitter accounts hacked the opening day of China’s 18th Party Congress.
Neil Heywood 'Was MI6 Informant'
Neil Heywood, the British businessman murdered in China, gave MI6 info on Bo Xilai.
Online Poll Shows Overwhelming Support For End to China’s One-Child Policy
Out of 30,006 votes cast, 71.7% support abrogating the one-child policy, and only 28.3% want to keep it. The poll was conducted after a study by the China Development Research Foundation emerged, recommending an abolition of the current one-child...
One-Child Policy Up for Reform in China?
The unpopular policy should be phased out, says a Chinese government think tank.
Media
11.02.12
Chinese Movie Mogul Promises New Party Leaders Will Open Market to Hollywood
A wise old cartoon turtle in Kung Fu Panda advises Po, the portly black and white star of the 2004 DreamWorks Animation blockbuster film, not to fret about honing his fighting skills, but rather to focus on the moment and do...
Silencing a Voice for Justice
I have been recently seeking to use the rule of law to achieve social justice. This isn’t easy in a country where legal vagueness and arbitrary enforcement make advocacy a constant uphill battle. But in my career, I’ve encountered few cases as...
A Third Day of Protests in China Against Refinery Reach Third Day
Hundreds protesting a petrochemical plant's expansion plans, swarmed Ningbo port tossing water bottles at riot police officers.
In China, 'Mad Men' Reflects Reality of Modern Life
The 1960s-driven TV drama resonates with ambitious young Chinese professionals.
The Battle for Breakfast
Chinese love fast food but no Western chain has figured out how to please the hungry in the morning.
An Alternative Look at China’s Labor Markets
Unemployment is arguably the most important, but least well measured, factor in China’s economy. Low unemployment and rising wages signal economic health, making it less likely that the government will rush to pump up growth. The reverse – mass...
"The Revolutionary": An Unrequited Love for China
In a new documentary on his life, Sidney Rittenberg, who once translated for Mao, refers to his jailer as both a hero and criminal.
China's Consumer-led Growth
Official data show that consumption contributed over half of China's growth so far this year, more than investment's contribution.