China’s Latest Deadly Industrial Explosion Spotlights Dire Workplace Safety

Charlie Campbell
Time
Explosion that killed at least 14 came during a key meeting of the Chinese Communist Party and was swiftly censored

China’s Craft Breweries Find They May Have a 5,000-Year-Old Relative

Austin Ramzy
New York Times
Pottery vessels discovered in Shaanxi Province might be the first direct evidence of a beer-brewing operation.

Caixin Media

11.24.14

At Factory Waste Ponds, Fumes Choke Fantasies

Deep in the Tengger Desert, near a community of cattle herders about 700 kilometers west of Beijing, pipes from a complex of coal processing and chemical factories once spewed slimy wastewater into six ponds.The "evaporation ponds" were...

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.

Xi Jinping’s Inner Circle: The Shaanxi Gang

Cheng Li
Brookings Institution
This analysis is an excerpt of a paper examining the members of Xi Jinping's inner circle. It specifically looks at the “Shaanxi Gang,” national leaders tied to Shaanxi province whose ascent to leadership paralleled Xi’s own.

The Perils of Private Enterprise: There Was Blood

Economist
A visitor to Jingbian county in northern Shaanxi province finds at its heart a thriving oil town in the grip of a state-owned company, Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum. Yanchang’s building, 12 storeys high, towers over the low-slung town. The company is...

Down There on a Visit

Martin Bernal from New York Review of Books
In many ways this is the book that everybody interested in China has been waiting for, a book describing what it feels like to be a peasant living through the Chinese Revolution. In the summer of 1962 Jan Myrdal, the thirty-year-old son of the...