Large-scale engineering projects and rigorous state control are hallmarks of the Chinese developmental model, and both have been apparent in the country’s approach to water management.A US$62 billion project to divert water from the south to the parched north is under way, while the government is investing US$3.35 billion in desalination plants, aiming to produce 2.2 million cubic meters of desalted water a day by...

Little Lu, Little Zhang, and Little Liu waited for me at the end of the bridge. They were ten, twelve, and fourteen years old, respectively, and they had come from the same village in northern Sichuan Province. They said that they had dropped out of school and migrated to the south because their families were too poor to afford the school fees. I had met them three days earlier in downtown Shenzhen, where they had...

In 1997, as James Cameron’s Titanic sank box office records around the world—including in China—Sally Berger, assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, worked to bring New York moviegoers a raft of Chinese movies they’d never heard of.The fourteen films in the series were not martial arts pictures or costume dramas, but instead movies like director Wu Wenguang’s stark 1990 documentary Bumming in...