Jessica Batke is ChinaFile’s Senior Editor for Investigations. She researches China’s domestic political and social affairs, and served as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Analyst for nearly eight years prior to joining ChinaFile in 2017. In 2016, she was a Visiting Academic Fellow at MERICS in Berlin. She holds a B.A. in Linguistics from Pitzer College and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University.
Last Updated: January 11, 2023
12.20.18
What More Do We Know about Recent Detentions and Foreign NGOs?
More than a week after the detention of two Canadian citizens, we know very little about the nature of the charges against them. Of particular concern to the foreign NGO community is the detention of Michael Kovrig, an employee of the non-profit...
12.12.18
Foreign NGO Employee Detained in Beijing
On Monday night, Chinese authorities detained Michael Kovrig of the Brussels-based non-profit International Crisis Group (ICG) in Beijing. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested—though did not definitively state—that Kovrig may have...
09.07.18
Shanghai Labor Union Preventing “Enemy Infiltration” along with Managing Foreign NGOs
In an official document dated late July, the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions, the city’s branch of the country’s official, Party-affiliated trade union, outlined the major themes of its work going forward, including preventing “enemy...
Features
08.23.18
What Satellite Images Can Show Us about ‘Re-education’ Camps in Xinjiang
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...
08.21.18
Chinese Partner Units: Who (and Where) Are They?
When considering the impact of the Foreign NGO Law, we often think first of the foreign NGOs themselves—who they are, and where they’re able to gain approval to carry out work in China. Yet, for foreign NGOs carrying out temporary activities in...
08.09.18
What More Can We Learn about Temporary Activities?
How common is it for a temporary activity to cover multiple provinces? Are some provincial Public Security Bureaus (PSBs) more likely to allow cross-provincial activities than others? How many of all the temporary activities are just being done by a...
07.25.18
Does China’s Foreign NGO Law Present a Non-profit Opportunity for Taiwan?
from The News Lens
Establishing operations in Taiwan wasn’t the most logical option for international organizations whose missions demanded they be on the ground to engage with the challenging but dynamic “wild west” of civil society work in the P.R.C. Could the...
06.06.18
Here’s How NGOs Are Allowed to Operate in the P.R.C., Hong Kong, and the United States
The last year has seen extensive discussion of China’s Foreign NGO Law, focusing especially on whether or not the law would cause a major shift in the kind of work foreign NGOs are able to do in the mainland. Less often examined, however, is how...
Conversation
06.04.18
How Should the World Respond to Intensifying Repression in Xinjiang?
Deliberate, systematic human rights abuses are happening in China’s northwest. Reporting and research published in recent weeks shows that the Chinese government is targeting the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’s roughly 11 million Muslims for “re...
Features
05.11.18
Central and Regional Leadership for Xinjiang Policy in Xi’s Second Term
from China Leadership Monitor
After the 19th Party Congress last fall and the recent “two meetings” in March, the Party-state has now completed its quinquennial leadership turnover and announced a major restructuring of a number of Party and state entities. This institutional...
Viewpoint
03.15.18
Who Really Haunts Xi Jinping, Mao or Gorbachev?
Last week, the Chinese National People’s Congress removed Presidential and Vice-Presidential term limits, effectively allowing current President (and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary) Xi Jinping to stay in power beyond the two terms that...
02.02.18
Chinese Civil Society in 2018: What’s Ahead?
The impetus for this event is it’s about a year since the new Foreign NGO Law was implemented in China. There was also another law implemented in 2016, the Charity Law, that governs how domestic NGOs function in China. But there’s a lot more going...