Nestled between mountains and a winding river in a scenic corner of Shanxi province is Zhongyang County, the home of an exquisite Confucian temple built during the Ming dynasty.
The colorful wooden temple graced this idyllic valley for...
Flying kites is the quintessential Chinese pastime. But “wind zithers” or “paper sparrow hawks,” as they are known in Chinese, also have a long history as tools. Over millennia, Chinese have used them for measuring the wind, gauging distances,...
CNPolitics, a Chinese-language news website,...
Tong 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...
A 15-year-old girl has made waves in the Chinese press recently for her fight against Shanghai authorities after she was banned from taking the college entrance examination because she does not hold a Shanghaihukou(household registration). She...
Working on urbanization will foster solutions to the challenges the world faces from China's pressure on ecosystems, resources and commodities.
Wanda, the world's No 1 movie theater owner, is planning a $10 billion spending spree to make Hollywood film co-productions and buy and build ...
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...
The journalist who publicized the deaths of five young boys in southwestern China last week, has been forced to take a “vacation.”
Sky City and its 2,749 feet distributed over 220 floors will grow in just 90 days in Changsha city, at the rate of five floors per day.
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...
As China's capital steels itself for the 18th Party Congress, the government is cracking down on balloons, homing pigeons, Ping-Pong balls and remote-control toy airplanes, anything that could potentially carry protest messages and mar the...
Navi Pillay says she's disturbed by reports of detentions, disappearances and the excessive use of force.
The unpopular policy should be phased out, says a Chinese government think tank.
Hundreds protesting a petrochemical plant's expansion plans, swarmed Ningbo port tossing water bottles at riot police officers.
The 1960s-driven TV drama resonates with ambitious young Chinese professionals.
Chinese love fast food but no Western chain has figured out how to please the hungry in the morning.
In China, life is comfortable for the fortunate few. For others, it’s a hand-to-mouth struggle for a full stomach, a place to live, wages for work done, and freedom to speak openly. It’s a place where few things are more important than food; “Have you eaten yet?” is another way of saying hello. After traversing the country and meeting its people, Ang shares her delicious experiences with us. She tells of a clandestine cup of salty yak butter tea with a Tibetan monk during a military crackdown, and explains how a fluffy spring onion omelet encapsulates China’s drive for rural development.
One couple asks if they can own a BMW on a combined income of $2,100 a month.
The evening sun sits low in the smoggy Beijing sky. Beneath a staid, maroon apartment block, Jiang Ying, 24, is stirring from her bed after having slept through the day. Day is night and night is day anyway in the window-less world she inhabits...
The 120,000-square foot NBA Center in Tianjin port near Beijing will house basketball courts, a fitness center and a restaurant and be part of a mixed-use development with housing for 150,000.
The forced eviction of people from their homes and farmland has become a routine occurrence in China and represents a gross violation of China’s international human rights obligations on an enormous scale. Despite international scrutiny and...
China’s great migration started with farmers boarding crowded trains in Sichuan, Henan, and Hubei - poor provinces in China’s interior. A day or two later, they arrived here, along the Pearl River Delta, just north of Hong Kong, and became...
This book is a photographic exploration of life in the old and rapidly disappearing quarters of Shanghai, with accompanying poems and essays by the author of fiction and poetry, Qiu Xiaolong.
The photographs, all taken in a documentary style over a period of five years, represent an intimate and invaluable visual natural history of a way of life in the workers quarters and other central districts of the city that held sway throughout the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century, before yielding to the ambitious ongoing efforts at urban reconstruction.
This is a story that sounds familiar, that we think we know or can imagine: old houses torn down for luxury malls, ordinary people poorly compensated, an intimate way of life replaced by highways and high-rises.
All of this is happening in...
Within the past decade, Beijing has debuted as the defining city of the now and foreseeable future, and China as the ascendant global power. Beijing is the ultimate representation of China's political and cultural capital, of its might—and threat. For so long, the city was closed off to the world, literally built around the Forbidden City, the icon of all that was ominous about China. But now, the country is eager to show off its new openness, its glory and magnanimity, and Beijing is its star.
China’s Hui Muslims are unique in many respects. The country’s second-largest ethnic minority share linguistic and cultural ties with the majority in China that have allowed them to practice their religion with less interference and fewer...
n the ongoing debate about globalization, what's been missing is the voices of workers -- the millions of people who migrate to factories in China and other emerging countries to make goods sold all over the world....
Crowdsourcing has been around for awhile (this 2006 Wired article nicely lays out the concept). Over the last three years, crowdsourcing has been applied to fundraising with stunning results on Kickstarter and Indiegogo (“Go fund yourself”), and...
Far East, Up North records five domestic first-class skaters glide in Russian local journey. Short planning by Converse skaters list include domestic skateboard industry five impressive names: Li Zhi Xin, Lo Kam Lok, Huang Jian Feng, Du Ming Gen...
Returning to Beijing after nearly 50 years sparks recollections of a China long gone, and the memory of one very special meeting.
The crackdown by China’s third-largest city is the most restrictive in a series of moves by big Chinese cities that are putting quality-of-life issues ahead of short-term economic growth, something the central...
Last Saturday China’s independent film community faced their latest setback when the Beijing Independent Film Festival was forced to cancel its public screenings upon pressure from local authorities. This was the third consecutive cancellation...
Two members of the Russian punk collective Pussy Riot are on the run and have fled the country, the band said...
Costing a total of 50bn yuan (£5bn), this mammoth entertainment, retail and office hub, named the Han Street Cultural Centre, may be the most ambitious single project of its kind in the world. And it is being built not in Shanghai, Beijing or...
Lars Nittve will never forget the first time he visited a museum alone. “There was this enormous sculpture of a woman and you walked into her between her legs,” he recalls. “It was like a museum within a museum there. For a 13-year-old boy, that...
Traveling through modern Chinese cities at times feels a blur, the view from a bus or taxi window seemingly untethered from any past or even particularities of place. In one sense, everything everywhere looks the same; it's easy to feel a little...
Beijing, as most Chinese know it, was a neglected relic after the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, when the victorious communists moved the capital back there from Nanjing, it was a bankrupt town of 1.4...
When I ask Ou Ning how he would answer that perennial dinner party question, "What do you do?," he laughs. It’s not easy for one of China’s true polymaths, but he gives it a try. “I’m a cultural worker,” he offers modestly, before teasing out...
A twenty-six-year-old woman who moved to Beijing from a distant town for work could be a poster child for urban China’s latest housing market phenomenon: skyrocketing rents.
The woman, surnamed Fang, said goodbye to Liaoning province three...
China exists today in a liminal realm, caught between the socialist idealism of old and a calamitous drive for wealth spurned by recent free market reforms. This seemingly unbridgeable gap tears at the country’s social fabric while provoking younger generations to greater artistic heights. The unique sound emerging from Beijing’s underground delves deeply into this void, aggressively questioning the moral and social basis of China’s fragile modernity even as it subsists upon it.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Chinese women have become quite a force to be reckoned with in recent years. According to Forbes magazine, 11 of the 20 richest self-made women in the
...If this past weekend’s deluge in Beijing shows us anything, it’s that nothing and no one in this city is waterproof.
For a capital city unusual, and perhaps unique, in being situated neither on a coastline nor along the banks of a big river, Beijing has been under water a lot of late. Violent summer rainstorms flooded the city in June of last year, overwhelming...
While fashion labels are spending more on magazine advertising in the United States, they’re pouring even more money into magazines across mainland China.
The Chinese capital's heaviest rainstorm in six decades killed at least 37 people, flooded streets and stranded 80,000 people at the main airport, state media and the government said on Sunday.
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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.
In China, as is doubtless the case elsewhere, the distinction between online and offline is blurring. That presents the Communist party with a potentially dangerous problem. Online comment can serve a useful official function, allowing people to...
On June 19, I saw the oft-retweeted images on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, which showed black people in Guangzhou city protesting together. My first reaction: This image was from three years ago. Only after an online search did I realize the...
