Peak Xi Jinping?

Geremie R. Barmé

The adulation of Xi Jinping, China’s State President, Party General Secretary, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, has yet to reach similar lofty heights as that of Mao Zedong. However, on September 3, the official Beijing media took a brave step in the direction of Mao-era excess. In reporting on the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and Xi Jinping’s meetings and talks with various heads of African nations, the front page of the People’s Daily featured Xi’s name no fewer than 45... Read full story>>

Beijing’s Bid for Global Power in the Age of Trump

Alfred W. McCoy via TomDispatch

As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita... Read full story>>

Technology and Innovation in an Era of U.S.-China Strategic Competition

A China in the World Podcast

Paul Haenle & Elsa Kania via Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy

China has taken significant steps to implement national strategies and encourage investment in order to surpass the U.S. in high tech fields like artificial intelligence. In this podcast, Paul Haenle sat down with Elsa Kania, adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former Carnegie-Tsinghua Young Ambassador, to discuss the impacts of increasing competition in technology development and innovation on the U.S.-China relationship and the consequences for future cooperation in... Read full story>>

We Need to Be Careful about How We Use the Word ‘Chinese’

Martin Thorley

In recent years, the growing reach of the Chinese Communist Party’s (C.C.P.’s) political influence abroad has prompted numerous countries to reappraise their engagement with China. Optimism about Chinese convergence with international norms has been replaced with concerns over C.C.P. influence strategies in the wider world. As the pendulum swings from naivety to vigilance, dangers abound, not least to overseas Chinese communities. In some cases, these communities face both suspicion in their... Read full story>>

What Satellite Images Can Show Us about ‘Re-education’ Camps in Xinjiang

A Q&A with Shawn Zhang

Jessica Batke

Claims that “re-education” camps are merely vocational training centers seem even less credible after one looks at the work of Shawn Zhang. A law student focusing on jurisprudence at the University of British Columbia in Canada, in May Zhang began scouring Google Earth for evidence of detentions in Xinjiang—matching up the addresses he found in documents related to the camps that he found online with satellite images; learning to recognize the distinguishing characteristics of camps, both in... Read full story>>

It’s Too Easy to Wind up in a Chinese Psychiatric Hospital, and Far Too Hard to Get Out

Jerome A. Cohen & Chi Yin

Every day in China, hundreds of people are involuntarily confined in mental health facilities, some through their involvement in criminal cases, many more via the government’s civil commitment processes. Whether, how, and how long to detain the seriously mentally ill is, to be sure, a worldwide problem of increasing gravity. In China, where the government employs many types of detention, these issues have proved to be particularly troublesome. Read full story>>

The Window

The Aftermath of the Tianjin Explosion

Zhou Na

I have spent three years collecting accounts and examining how survivors and families have coped since that traumatic event. I document the lingering pain, to resist public forgetting and indifference. Hundreds of photographs bear witness to the broken windows, scorched facades, and environmental contamination, attesting to the mass destruction and disruption of the private spaces that were once called home. Read full story>>

‘Ruling Through Ritual’: An Interview with Guo Yuhua

Ian Johnson via New York Review of Books

Guo Yuhua is one of China’s best-known sociologists and most incisive government critics. A professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, she has devoted her career to researching human suffering in Chinese society, especially that of peasants, the promised beneficiaries of Communist rule. Born in 1956, Guo grew up in one of the “big courtyards” of government housing compounds for the country’s ruling elite. Her parents were military officers who served in the central government. During the... Read full story>>