Guangzhou’s Rubbish Charge Struggle
from chinadialogueLike many of China’s rapidly growing cities, Guangzhou is under siege from landfill. The southern city produces about 18,000 tons of household waste every day, 14,000 tons of which needs to be disposed of after sorting and recycling. That is as...
The Plight of a Young Chinese Volunteer
Around noon on May 4th, 2012, Song Ze received a phone call in which the caller said someone who had been put in a “black jail” [an illegal prison used mostly to detain petitioners, disempowered citizens who went to Beijing to file...
Chinese Students Living in Fear in the USA
While there are certainly plenty of Chinese students overseas who are spoiled brats, often called ‘second generation rich’ and ‘second generation officials’ (fu erdai and guan erdai) who live off the fruits of their parents’...
Fashion Magazines Laden With Ads Thriving
While fashion labels are spending more on magazine advertising in the United States, they’re pouring even more money into magazines across mainland China.
Reports of Forced Abortions Fuel Push to End Chinese Law
Recent reports of women being coerced into late-term abortions by local officials have thrust ...
Violence Against Doctors on the Rise
AFTER a growing number of attacks on medical staff in China, doctors and nurses are finding hospitals increasingly unsafe. According to figures from the Ministry of Health, more than 17,000 “incidents” aimed at...
Inside the Documentary "Ai Weiwei, Never Sorry"
IN the summer of 2006, having just graduated from Brown University with a degree in history and a yearning for travel, Alison Klayman headed to China. She arrived there speaking no Chinese, with only one contact and...
Attack of the Piranhas
from Sinica PodcastThis week on Sinica, Chinese economic growth is on the rocks, ASEAN tensions are breaking through the facade of East-Asian political unity, a major Chinese telecom company is implicated in an international trade scandal, and man-eating fish have...
Rock and Roll in China: An Insider’s Journey
The jaded Western music establishment can learn a thing or two from China, Jonathan Campbell says. The 37-year-old, who spent four years in Beijing as a band promoter, documents the relatively brief history of Chinese rock in his book...
A Liberal Arts Education, Made in China
No one, it seems, is pleased with China’s educational system. Chinese nationalists fret that students are graduating without the critical and creative skills necessary to compete globally. Foreign observers worry that heavy political...
China's New Dictionary: Agricultural Cooperative Is Out, Hair Gel Is In
When saying goodbye, people in China often say "Bye Bye." But until this July there was no Chinese way of writing that. There is now: Beijing's guardians of the language have deemed "Bai Bai" the correct written form,...
Long Wait Leads to Standoff With Officials
Thousands of people threw water bottles and blocked traffic at a popular nature preserve in northeastern China on Sunday after word spread that the arrival of top Communist Party leaders was causing an hours-long wait to visit a scenic lake. It...
A Catholic Wedding in Beijing (video)
In China, people are flocking to the city’s oldest Catholic church for a sense of community, entertainment, or a wedding ceremony, even if they are not Catholic.
Vineyards Pop Corks on Chinese Wine Investors
Wine-tasting party conversations among investors in China are increasingly sounding like sour grapes.
Some well-heeled wine investors have been anxiously debating whether a price bubble for investment-grade wine is getting ready to burst....
More than Medals for China’s Olympic Stars
China’s best athletes have not only broken records but they’ve hauled in increasingly sizeable cash bonuses from central and local governments for their champion, medal-winning performances at Olympic events.
Between 1984, when China re-...
Attitudes Toward Homosexuality
ZHEN AI used a conventional method to uncover the truth about her husband’s “business trips”. She logged on to his computer. But what Ms Zhen, who was three months pregnant at the time, found was beyond her imaginings. She saw photos of her...
China Cracks Down on Money-Smuggling Ring
A Chinese court in Chongqing convicted 18 people on Tuesday of running a nearly $10 billion money-smuggling ring, according to an attorney involved, giving Chinese officials one of their biggest victories yet in...
China's Unsafe Drinking Water
Hurtling beneath the ground, there are sturdy new subways coursing through every major urban center of China like an electric current of modernity. The country's rapid urbanization in a matter of mere decades has...
Two Arrests in China Unnerve Art World
The frothy contemporary-art scene here has lost some of its ebullience in the three and a half months since a German art handler and a Chinese associate were detained on charges that they undervalued imported art to avoid customs duties.
Time for China to Abandon Its Population Control Policy
Last week, the government of the Philippines announced plans to allocate nearly $12 million towards contraceptive supplies for community clinics. Yesterday, the London Summit on Family Planning brought together government leaders, representatives...
Pursuing Preservation Without Disney-ficiation
One of China’s last intact walled cities is undergoing something of an identity crisis. Pingyao, in China’s Shanxi province, has endured for 2,700 years, escaping the destruction of the Cultural Revolution because the city was too poor and too...
The Uncertain Future of Beijing's Migrant Schools
As the gap between China’s urban and rural economies continues to expand, the largest rural-urban migration in world history persists. When those from the countryside arrive in the city, the current hukou system blocks their access to the social...
Beijing's Olympic Ruins
While being awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics allowed Beijing to construct new architectural icons and receive international accolades, its current reality is a collection of unused sports facilities with few if any plans for reuse.
Restoring Eco-balance
from chinadialogueIn the late 1970s, China was swept by a wave of economic growth, and with it a wholesale attack on nature. Grain was planted on grasslands and profits extracted from rivers. Land was reclaimed from lakes and seas and forests were felled for...
Qingdao Toilet Paper Abuse Triggers Morals Debate
An eastern Chinese city's efforts to build user-friendly toilets have ended with huge losses of free toilet paper, provoking reflections on the misuse of public amenities in China. As most Chinese public lavatories do not provide paper or charge...
Peter Hessler on His Surprising First Trip to China
I first went to China in 1994, after finishing two years of graduate school at Oxford. I had studied English language and literature, which I enjoyed, but I realized that I wanted to do something different with my career. I knew that I wanted to...
Powerless Media=Powerless Citizens, Says China Youth Daily Editorial
Tapping into widespread public frustration with corruption among government officials, advocates of press freedom in China seem to have found an effective tool with which to ally citizens to the journalistic cause. In...
China Hires Tens of Thousands of North Korean Guest Workers
China is quietly inviting tens of thousands of North Korean guest workers into the country in a deal that will provide a cash infusion to help prop up a teetering regime with little more to export than the drudgery of a desperately poor...
China Needs To Ease One-Child Policy, State Researchers Say
Chinese government researchers called on the nation to ease its one-child policy as soon as possible to cope with an aging population and labor shortage. One option is allowing all people to have a second child, three researchers including Yu...
On Chinese Liquor Brand Is the Life of the Party
Government and Communist Party officials in China have been pounding down so much Moutai grain alcohol — the good stuff, the expensive stuff, not the everyday rotgut — that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao recently proposed slashing the state budget for...
Project Harmony: The Chorus behind China’s Voice
With a population of more than 1.3 billion people, can there really be such thing as a single “voice of China”? According to the Chinese government, the answer is, without question, yes. Not only does there exist a “China's voice” or a “Chinese...
China’s Looming Pension Crisis Spooks Workers
China faces a pension crisis as its population ages, and that prospect is starting to alarm Chinese workers who are already struggling to pay for education, healthcare and housing. By the time those people who joined the workforce in the 1980s...
Novelist Chan Koonchung on China’s ‘Lack of Trust’
“I started to think about this book in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics,” says Chan Koonchung of his dystopian novel Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 (The Fat Years). “2008 was the beginning of a new chapter for China, which is when I...
Hong Kong Journalists Warn of Self-Censorship
As the 15th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to mainland China on July 1 approaches, local journalists say that press freedoms have eroded in recent years and self-censorship is on the rise. According to a survey by the Hong Kong Journalist’s...
Teaching Tiananmen
With more than two decades of hindsight, it has become clear that 1989 marked a key turning point in world history. It is now possible to analyze the momentous events of 1989 in a historical fashion, and also to teach history classes about them....
China’s Turn Against Law
Chinese authorities are reconsidering legal reforms they enacted in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms had emphasized law, litigation, and courts as institutions for resolving civil grievances between citizens and administrative grievances...
Bloomberg Unearths Xi Jinping’s Family Fortune
A recent Bloomberg report detailing the millionaire assets of the extended family of Xi Jinping, China’s presumptive next leader, has drawn praise...
Bo Xilai: Inside the Scandal - A WSJ Documentary (Video)
The fall of Bo Xilai, once a rising star in Chinese politics, has plunged the country into its biggest crisis since Tiananmen Square. In this documentary, The Wall Street Journal examines how his downfall has altered the debate about China's...
Got a Dream and an Idea, Go to China
America is not the only great power struggling with how to handle the future of foreigners in its midst. As the Supreme Court indicated in its mixed decision Monday on Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, the question of how we regard those who...
Beyond Foxconn: Deplorable Working Conditions Characterize Apple’s Entire Supply Chain
On June 14th, 2012 a Foxconn worker jumped to his death from his apartment building in Chengdu, marking the 18th reported worker suicide at Foxconn factories in China in just over two years. Many additional suicides may have gone unreported. But...
Father in Chinese Forced-Abortion Scandal Is Said to Be Missing
The Chinese man who published photographs online of his wife and their dead fetus — government officials forced her to submit to an abortion at seven months — has gone missing after being tracked by security officials and thugs, according to his...
Evolving Attitudes to Foreigners
Four years ago, Beijing sang "Beijing Welcomes You" for the 100-day countdown to the 2008 Olympic Games, but now the city has added an "if" during the 100-day crackdown on illegal foreigners. Beijing welcomes you if you are not an illegal...
The Censor at Hong Kong's Post
Five months ago when Wang Xiangwei was named editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's leading English-language daily, local journalists shook their heads in dismay. Mr. Wang, a former China Daily reporter and current member of...
As Western Media Contract, the China Daily Expands
These are unsettling times to be a journalist. I spent part of my Sunday afternoon watching “Page One,” a movie documenting the funereal mood inside The New York Times newsroom, while highlighting the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing “...
Is Its Educational System Pulling China Up or Holding It Back?
China wants inventors and entrepreneurs, but its schools, built around the notorious gaokao exam, are still designed to produce cookie-cutter engineers and accountants.
‘Pressure for Change is at the Grassroots
from New York Review of BooksThe Chinese legal activist Chen Guangcheng arrived in the United States last month following top-level negotiations between U.S. and Chinese officials. Several weeks earlier, Chen had dramatically escaped from house arrest in his village in...
Isolated in Yunnan
Since June 2011, an estimated 75,000 ethnic Kachin have hostilities between the Burmese army and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in northern Burma. Thousands of them have sought refuge in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, where the Chinese...
Snapshots from a Rising China
Mention China and people think of the Great Wall, tofu, kung fu, and of course, Confucius. They might also think of the skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, and the unforgettable 2008 Olympics which heralded China’s rise as a great nation. People...
U.S.-China Public Perceptions Opinion Survey 2012
The re-establishment of U.S.-China relations in 1971 marked a strategic step that ended China’s isolation and transformed the global balance of power. Since that historic milestone, the United States as an established superpower and China as an...
Americans in China
It used to be that the American expats in China were the big shots. They had the money, the status, the know-how. But that's changed. What's it like to be an American living in China now? And what do they understand about China that we don't?
Self-Censorship at the South China Morning Post?
According to an article published on June 19 in the Asia Sentinel, an internal squabble at the Hong Kong-...
The Charms of Qing TV
It's a good time to be a Manchu on television. Costume dramas such as “Palace” and “Bu Bu Jing Xin”, which feature modern-day protagonists flung back in time to the days of the Qing emperors, rank among the most-watched programmes on China’s...
The One-Child Policy
from Sinica PodcastWhile the African community in Guangzhou has taken to the streets to protest the suspicious death of a foreign national in police custody, the Chinese Internet has proven equally volatile as gruesome photos of a late-stage abortion have...
Why Chinese Soccer Matters
Imagine if David Stern, after his retirement as commissioner of the N.B.A., was led off in leg irons for taking bribes. His predecessor goes with him on a ten-year hitch behind bars. And, for good measure, throw in a couple of members of the...
Journalistic Ethics Questioned at SCMP
So why was Li Wangyang’s suicide not news – at first?
A decision by the South China Morning Post’s new editor in chief, Wang Xiangwei, to reduce a major breaking story on the suspicious death of Tiananmen dissident Li Wangyang in a Hunan...