Alibaba’s Jack Ma Thinks He Knows How to Save China's ‘Left-Behind Children’ — He’s Asking Other Entrepreneurs to Buy In

Karen Gilchrist
CNBC
The founder and executive chairman of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba said that investing in rural boarding schools could provide a solution for China’s “left-behind children” and ensure a more prosperous future for the next generation.

A Life-Size Replica of the Titanic Is under Construction in China’s Countryside

Rob Schmitz
NPR
The film moved Su Shaojun, the developer overseeing the project, so much that when he became a developer 15 years later, he proposed building a resort and theme park featuring a replica.

Media

05.31.16

Will China’s ‘Taobao Villages’ Spur a Rural Revolution?

from chinadialogue
The province of Shanxi, in northern China, is famous for coal mining, and the industry’s impact is etched across the landscape. But the province’s southern counties, which lie near the Yellow River, are known for a very different commodity—red dates...

Green Space

05.11.16

The Dark Side of Country Life

Michael Zhao
The last time we peeked at Lei Hu’s photo blog, Lei was giving us a cheery look at a China that we rarely get to see: the countryside and its beauty. But there’s a dark side to country life in China, as well, and a new blog post from Lei explores...

China's Military Must Help Xinjiang Modernize

Reuters
Guardian
China’ wants to bring “modern civilisation” to the southern areas of Xinjiang, where Muslim ethnic Uighurs are in a majority, and help develop its economy

Caixin Media

06.09.15

China’s Cabinet Unveils Plan to Improve Rural Schools

The State Council has released a plan for improving the quality of education in rural areas over the next five years—a move the cabinet says is aimed at improving the quality of teaching at primary and secondary schools in the country’s less-...

Sinica Podcast

03.23.15

In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland

Kaiser Kuo, David Moser & more from Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are joined by Michael Meyer, the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing and now In Manchuria, a part literary travelogue and part journalistic account of three years spent living with family in rural Jilin.{...

Media

03.04.15

The Other China

Michael Meyer & Ian Buruma
Writers Michael Meyer and Ian Buruma engage in a discussion co-sponsored by The New York Review of Books centered on Meyer’s new book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China, which combines immersion...

Earthbound China

03.02.15

Village Acupuncture

Andrew Stokols
On a bamboo-covered mountaintop the mud-walled houses of Diaotan village are just barely visible through the thick fog that often shrouds this remote hamlet in China’s Zhejiang province. Worn but sturdy earthen walls still enclose the largest...

Culture

02.04.15

‘This is not that China Story’

James Carter & Michael Meyer
James Carter spent much of the 1990s researching the modern history of Harbin, China’s northernmost major city, in the region that is today known as dongbei, the northeast. That region is the subject of Michael Meyer’s forthcoming book, In Manchuria...

Excerpts

01.28.15

The View from Wasteland

Michael Meyer
In winter the land is frozen and still. A cloudless sky shines off snow-covered rice paddies, reflecting light so bright, you have to shield your eyes. I lean into a stinging wind and trudge north up Red Flag Road, to a village named Wasteland.The...

Xi’s Yunnan Visit Highlights Poverty Elimination, Ethnic Solidarity

Xinhua
Xinhua
President Xi Jinping seeks to rally support for a "tough battle" against poverty and to speed up growth in the country's relatively underdeveloped ethnic regions.

Video

12.15.14

Down to the Countryside

Sun Yunfan & Leah Thompson
The world has heard much of late about the scale and scope of China’s mass migration from the poor rural countryside to its booming cities. Some think the number of these migrant workers will soon reach some 400 million souls. They have created...

Earthbound China

12.15.14

A Map of China’s Back-to-the-Land Efforts

Leah Thompson
In our short film “Down to the Countryside,” Sun Yunfan and I follow Ou Ning, an artist and curator who moved from Beijing to the village of Bishan in rural Anhui province in 2013, where he experiments with preserving and revitalizing local heritage...

China’s Answer To Its Poverty Of Space: Moving Mountains

Eric Meyer
Forbes
Chongqing, Shiyan, Yichang, Lanzhou and Yan’an. All belong to the “Yellow” China, a parched region tormented by a complicated geography that severely limits almost all human activities, such as farming, communications, construction or industry.

Scientists Warn Against China’s Plan to Flatten Over 700 Mountains

Stuart Clark
Guardian
Environmental consequences of removing hills to create more land for cities not considered, academics say in Nature paper.

Reports

05.01.11

China and Africa: Small Hydro Power Cooperation

Leon White
He Jianan
Global Environmental Institute
The development of Small Hydro Power (SHP) in China has been a success for rural electrification yet to be replicated in the rest of the world. This paper introduces basic technical, financial, and policy principles of SHP and examines the factors...