Is This the Last Dalai Lama?

Jessica Batke

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet. His departure exposed the rift between the Tibetan faithful and the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), one which has not closed in the six decades since—and which threatens to become even deeper once the current Dalai Lama, 83-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, passes on. Read full story>>

‘I Can’t Sleep: Homage to a Uyghur Homeland’

A Q&A with Photographer Lisa Ross

Lisa Ross & Muyi Xiao

In the 2000s, New York-based artist Lisa Ross traveled to the city of Turpan in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and photographed local people on the beds that they keep in their fields. The portraits in that series are currently on exhibit at the Miyako Yoshinaga gallery in New York through March 16, 2019. ChinaFile’s Visuals Editor, Muyi Xiao, interviewed Ross about the work and its connection to the campaign of repression and incarceration of Uighurs taking place in Xinjiang today. Read full story>>

Here’s How the Trade War Is Affecting Hollywood

Ying Zhu

In February 2017, the United States and China began renegotiating the five-year film pact that had limited the annual number of foreign film exports to China to 34 and the share of revenue payable to foreign-rights holders to 25 percent of gross box office. Hollywood wanted an increase in revenue-sharing films, a higher share of box-office receipts, and more access to key viewing windows in China’s ever-expanding film market. In January 2018, Beijing agreed to discuss “policies and practices... Read full story>>

‘It’s Hopeless But You Persist’: An Interview with Jiang Xue

Ian Johnson via New York Review of Books

The forty-five-year-old investigative journalist Jiang Xue is one of the most influential members of a group of journalists who came of age in the early 2000s, taking advantage of new—if temporary—freedoms created by the Internet to investigate pressing social issues. She worked at Chinese Business View (Huashangbao) until 2014, when she quit as its opinion-page editor over censorship. Since then, she has kept writing to an ever-shrinking audience on social media, most notably about the wives... Read full story>>

The Future of China-U.S. Military Relations

A ChinaFile Conversation

Joel Wuthnow, Oriana Skylar Mastro & more via ChinaFile Conversation

The U.S.-China military relationship has been relatively stable over the past few years. Both sides’ leaders recognize that effective relations between the two militaries help prevent crises and stabilize the broader bilateral relationship. Events in late 2018, however, demonstrated how easily the military relationship could get off track. How much cooperation can be expected throughout 2019? What should the agenda be for U.S.-China military relations, and what obstacles will need to be... Read full story>>

‘We’re Very Sexy People’: How the U.S. Miscalculated Its Allure to China

Sergey Radchenko

The Sino-Vietnamese War is rarely remembered or discussed today. But 40 years ago, the war appeared to herald a tectonic shift in regional and global politics and helped forge a close, more trusting relationship between the leader of the free world and the world’s largest autocracy. China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam demonstrated that Beijing stood on the American side in the global Cold War—a message that President Jimmy Carter embraced. China may have been a brutal dictatorship, but the fact... Read full story>>

‘Reeducating’ Xinjiang’s Muslims

James A. Millward via New York Review of Books

In a courtroom in Zharkent, Kazakhstan, in July 2018, a former kindergarten principal named Sayragul Sauytbay calmly described what Chinese officials continue to deny: a vast new gulag of “de-extremification training centers” has been created for Turkic Muslim inhabitants of Xinjiang, the Alaska-sized region in western China. Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh, had fled Xinjiang and was seeking asylum in Kazakhstan, where her husband and son are citizens. She told the court how she had been transferred... Read full story>>

The Face of China’s #MeToo Movement Enters the Fray

Zhou Na

In the summer of 2014, Zhou Xiaoxuan, then a 21-year-old living in Beijing, filed a report with the local police. She described what had happened the previous day when she had delivered a basket of fruit to one of China’s most prominent news anchors, Zhu Jun, in his dressing room. Zhou told the police that after she entered the room, the anchor had kissed her and groped her against her will. Two days later, the police contacted Zhou’s parents and persuaded them not to pursue action against Zhu... Read full story>>