Notes from ChinaFile
09.09.22Online Posts Purport to Show Severe Lockdown Conditions in Xinjiang
Videos, voice messages, and WeChat posts purporting to show residents in the Ghulja (Yining), Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, area of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region crying out for food or medical attention have appeared online in recent...
Notes from ChinaFile
09.01.22For Your Weekend, September 1, 2022
As we go into the last weekend of the summer, and a holiday weekend for those in the U.S., we recommend this New Yorker essay in which Han Zhang discusses the censorship of feminists and reporting on incidents of gender-based violence.
Notes from ChinaFile
08.25.22
For Your Weekend, August 25, 2022
This weekend, we recommend this superb exploration of Chinese documentary film winning awards at fake documentary film festivals, from our friends at China Media Project.In this short interview, climate expert (and our Asia Society colleague) Thom...
Culture
08.15.22
Hong Kong Type
from Mekong Review
Over the past few years, readers, writers, and publishers in Hong Kong have become interested in the city’s history. New books about colonial figures, societal events, and relics not covered in textbooks have proliferated, dominating independent...
Notes from ChinaFile
08.10.22
For Your Weekend, August 11, 2022
The most recent episode of the Sinica Podcast, with former U.S. intelligence officer John Culver, was recorded last week before Beijing’s military exercises in the wake of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. But it’s an invaluable resource on both the...
Notes from ChinaFile
08.04.22
For Your Weekend, August 5, 2022
Thanks to our colleagues at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, we are reading this excellent investigation into the effects Chinese iron mining in Guinea, by Bloomberg’s Sheridan Prasso and featuring the work of our old friend,...
Features
08.04.22
In What Purport to be Lifestyle Videos, Uyghur Influencers Promote Beijing’s Narrative on Their Homeland
For the past few years, Uyghur and other young members of ethnic minority groups from Xinjiang have been creating videos like Anniguli’s in which they appear to display details of their personal lives while simultaneously evincing support for the...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.28.22For Your Weekend, July 28, 2022
For your weekend, we recommend Ian Johnson’s review of a new English language translation of Wang Xiaobo’s 1992 novella The Golden Age, released this week.You can read more on Wang, his unique place among contemporary Chinese writers, and...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.27.22Confession and Reconciliation in the Cultural Revolution’s Aftermath
Last week, frequent ChinaFile contributors Geremie Barmé and Zha Jianying joined editor Susan Jakes on Twitter Spaces to discus Zha’s recent short story for ChinaFile, “The Prize Student.” The story takes place in Nanjing in 1983, as a prominent...
Postcard
07.25.22
Norma in Kaohsiung
On a warm evening this past January, a crowd gathered outside the Weiwuying Opera House in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, more than an hour before the night’s performance was scheduled to begin. As they waited to enter the theater, people...
Viewpoint
07.21.22
From My Anguished Heart—A Letter to My Daughter
In early July 2020, Xu Zhangrun was detained for supposedly having “solicited prostitutes” during a trip with friends to Sichuan in late 2019. He was being persecuted for his unsparing critiques of Xi Jinping, starting in July 2018. The following...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.22Arrests and Charges Related to Hong Kong's National Security Law
Since May 2021, Lydia Wong, Eric Yan-ho Lai, and Thomas Kellogg, from the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University, have tracked the implementation of Hong Kong’s National Security Law, tallying up arrests and prosecutions as well as assessing...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.222021 (Most Recent) Official PRC Place Name Data Available for Download
For the last few years, ChinaFile has collected and hosted the list of official names of all the places (political units) in China. This information is openly available on the Chinese government’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) website, but not...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.22Participation in Xinjiang Surveillance Program Can Lead to Smoother Career Enhancement
Since 2014, authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have, as Human Rights Watch phrases it, sent “cadres from government agencies, state-owned enterprises, and public institutions to regularly visit and surveil people.” The program,...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.22A Note on Notes From ChinaFile
As ChinaFile approaches its 10th birthday, we find ourselves occasionally having something on the short side to say. Notes from ChinaFile will provide a dwelling place on our site for recommendations of books or articles, shrewd thoughts we overhear...
Features
06.03.22
The Prize Student
This short story, written in 2000 by Zha Jianying, is ChinaFile’s second foray into original fiction.
Features
05.24.22
Public Security Minister’s Speech Describes Xi Jinping’s Direction of Mass Detentions in Xinjiang
An internal Chinese government document provides new support for the extraordinary scale of internment during what was likely its peak in 2018 and 2019. The document, a transcript of an internal June 15, 2018 speech by Minister of Public Security...
Viewpoint
04.08.22
Closing the U.S. to Chinese Biotech Would Do Far More Harm Than Good
Biotechnology intrinsically blurs boundaries between science and commerce, market and state, the global and the national, and even personal privacy and collective interest. Progress depends more heavily in biotech than in other high-tech industries...
Features
04.05.22
Arrest Data Show National Security Law Has Dealt a Hard Blow to Free Expression in Hong Kong
On December 29, 2021, two hundred national security police officers raided a newspaper headquarters and arrested several individuals at various locations across Hong Kong. The exceptional number of police officers involved suggested those arrested...
Viewpoint
03.21.22
‘I’ve Forgotten How to Kneel in Front of You!’
It started with a simple message to his parents. Russian forces were invading Ukraine and, in case something happened to him, Wang Jixian, a computer programmer based in Odessa, decided he had better record a few words addressed to his parents on...
Viewpoint
03.12.22
Wang Jixian: A Voice from The Other China, but in Odessa
“Hello, everyone. This is Jixian in Odessa. Just checking in to let you know that I’m okay; I’m still alive.” This is the way that Wang Jixian, a 37-year-old software engineer originally from Beijing, starts most of his daily vlog updates posted...
Viewpoint
02.28.22
In Xinjiang’s Tech Incubators, Innovation Is Inseparable from Repression
Innovation and its benefits to society in Xinjiang have come to encompass both the use of big data to enhance cross-border trade and the use of big data to monitor people inside their own homes. Official documents promoting innovation in Xinjiang...
Viewpoint
02.03.22
Keeping the Flies Out
from Mekong Review
The first time I rode a public bus in China, in 1985, a young woman came up to me and ran her hand up and down my arm to feel the body hair. Foreigners were like rare animals then: precious, strange, probably dangerous. Surveillance was constant and...
Viewpoint
02.01.22
Verdicts from China’s Courts Used to Be Accessible Online. Now They’re Disappearing.
Judicial transparency in China has taken a significant step backward in recent months. Beginning at least a year ago, China’s Supreme People’s Court has considerably scaled back the number of cases available on its China Judgments Online web portal...
Features
01.31.22
A Vast Network of ‘New Era Civilization Practice Centers’ Is Beijing’s Latest Bid to Reclaim Hearts and Minds
New Era Civilization Practice Centers are designed to deliver a mix of social services and political indoctrination, to draw China’s citizens ever nearer to the Party by giving them tangible reminders of the Party’s largesse and molding them into...
Media
10.15.21
ChinaFile Presents: In the Camps—China’s High-Tech Penal Colony
Darren Byler joined ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes and Jessica Batke to discuss his new book, In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. Evidence has mounted in recent years that China’s government has incarcerated more than one million Uyghurs and...
Viewpoint
09.23.21
‘China’s Search for a Modern Identity Has Entered a New and Perilous Phase’
In 1980, writing the last paragraph of the last chapter of Coming Alive: China After Mao, I declared that China was moving “from totalitarian tyranny to a system more humane, part of a struggle by this nation to free itself from a straitjacket woven...
Viewpoint
09.09.21
A Farewell to My Students
Xu Zhangrun addresses this letter to the students and young scholars who participated in “The Three Talents Salon” which Xu founded in 2003, a biannual symposium devoted to fostering “three talents” or skills in the participants: in-depth reading,...
Viewpoint
09.02.21
How Much Does Beijing Control the Ethnic Makeup of Tibet?
The idea of swamping, which the Dalai Lama himself elaborated in 2008, holds that China’s government has been seeking to solve its problems in Tibet and other “ethnic minority” areas such as Xinjiang by turning local indigenous ethnic groups (such...
Features
08.19.21
Homage to Richard Nixon
This short story was written 20 years ago but never published. It is the first piece of original fiction to appear on ChinaFile since our launch in 2013. In a postscript, author Zha Jianying explains that when she unearthed the story earlier this...
Viewpoint
07.20.21
Making Sense of Support for Donald Trump in China
As the dust finally settled on the U.S. presidential election that shook the world, Biden was sworn in as president, and Trump, who tried everything to cling to a second term, slunk out of the capital city of Washington, D.C. in disgrace. Looking...
Viewpoint
07.10.21
Why China Is Going After Its Tech Giants
Just days after its lucrative listing on the New York Stock Exchange, China ride-hailing giant Didi Global was hit with another round of sanctions by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). On July 4, the country’s Internet regulator ordered...
Viewpoint
05.18.21
A Letter to My Editors and to China’s Censors
Xu Zhangrun, perhaps China’s most famous dissident legal scholar, released a letter addressed not only to China’s censors but also to the editors and publishers with whom he had worked for decades. That essay, translated below, is Letter Eight in...
Viewpoint
05.14.21
Ahead of Its Centennial, the Chinese Communist Party Frets Over Unsanctioned Takes on Its History
On July 1, the Chinese Communist Party will commemorate its founding in Shanghai one hundred years ago. Unsurprisingly, Beijing is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that nothing untoward takes place in the run-up to the great day. On April 9, the...
Features
05.03.21
New Data Show Hong Kong’s National Security Arrests Follow a Pattern
In the nine months since the Hong Kong National Security Law was passed, more than 90 people have been arrested under the new legislation. Though they have been charged with various breaches of national security ranging from inciting secession to...
Viewpoint
04.27.21
The Right Way to Bring Chinese STEM Talent Back to the U.S.
The Trump administration deployed a raft of restrictions on international students and workers, many of which directly targeted or disproportionally impacted Chinese STEM talent. While some measures had a basis in legitimate concerns like illicit...
Viewpoint
04.23.21
‘I Stand the Law’s Good Servant, but the People’s First’
Former legislator and prominent lawyer Margaret Ng was given a suspended sentence of 12 months. In her sentencing statement, which she read out in open court, Ng recounted her career in law and politics, interweaving her own story with the decades-...
Viewpoint
04.01.21
Will Protests against China Push Beijing to Intervene in Myanmar?
Angry with the results of the November election, which saw a landslide win for the ruling National League for Democracy party, Myanmar’s military claimed electoral fraud. On February 1, they seized power from the civilian government, rounding up...
Viewpoint
03.25.21
Abandoning Criticism of China’s Government Isn’t the Right Way to End Anti-Asian Racism in the U.S.
The recent surge of anti-Asian violence across the U.S., culminating in the tragedy of the Atlanta shooting, reminds us that the mainstream (mis)representation of Asian Americans as a model minority never spares us from racist hatred and the...
Viewpoint
01.22.21
In Xinjiang, Rare Protests Came Amid Lockdown
Six months after China rolled out its first coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan in late January 2020, Urumqi was placed under quarantine. The first lockdown specifically targeting the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, rather than the...
Features
12.30.20
‘Because There Were Cameras, I Didn’t Ask Any Questions’
Sometime in the summer of 2019, Vera Zhou, a young college student from the University of Washington, forgot to pretend that she was from the non-Muslim majority group in China, the Han. At a checkpoint at the mall, she put her ID on the scanner and...
Features
12.21.20
Pretty Lady Cadres
In early February, at the beginning of the outbreak of the deadly COVID-19 virus in China, Wang Fang, a local Communist Party secretary, was working around the clock. As an official responsible for 19,000 residents of a neighborhood in the city of...
Features
12.20.20
Message Control
Li Wenliang’s death had only been announced a few hours earlier, but Warming High-Tech was already on the case. The company had been monitoring online mentions of the COVID-whistleblower’s name in the several days since police had detained and...
Viewpoint
12.09.20
How the CCP Took over the Most Sacred of Uighur Rituals
The rooster hadn’t even stopped his crowing when the police arrived at my Uighur host’s courtyard in rural Turpan one early spring morning in 2008. Although they spoke calmly, almost apologetically, the uniformed Uighur officers demanded that the...
Features
10.30.20
State of Surveillance
Across China, in its most crowded cities and tiniest hamlets, government officials are on an unprecedented surveillance shopping spree. The coordination of the resulting millions of cameras and other snooping technology spread across the country...
Viewpoint
09.17.20
Could Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy in China Be Poised for a Breakthrough?
Last fall, as China’s lawmakers neared finalizing the country’s first-ever Civil Code, they opened to public comment its draft chapters on marriage and other areas of law. A newly formed coalition of LGBTQ organizations advocating for gay marriage...
Viewpoint
09.10.20
In Defense of Diplomacy with China
Critics of the last four decades of China policy have incorrectly and simplistically labeled diplomacy a failure because the People’s Republic did not become a liberal democracy. That was never the goal or an achievable objective of U.S. policy. The...
Viewpoint
08.27.20
When China Reporters Can’t Report from China
Shortly after midnight on March 18, a phone call awoke Steven Lee Myers in his Beijing apartment. The call was followed by a flurry of messages: WhatsApp, text, email. Friends and colleagues were asking him questions: What is going on? What does...
Viewpoint
08.20.20
How To Teach China This Fall
The coming academic year presents unique challenges for university instructors teaching content related to China. The shift to online education, the souring of U.S.-China relations, and new national security legislation coming from Beijing have...
Viewpoint
08.04.20
Reciprocity in U.S. Relations with China Should Be a Tool, Not the Whole Strategy
Since the outset of the U.S.-China trade war, critics have castigated the Trump administration for its capricious approach to relations with Beijing. They have found fault in particular with Donald Trump’s flip-flopping on sanctioning ZTE, banning U...
Viewpoint
07.30.20
For Wuhan’s COVID Mourners, Little Has Been Laid to Rest
In a conversation on Weibo, Yang, 50, told me about the loss of her 24-year-old daughter, Yuxi, her only child, to COVID-19. She was grieving, of course, but she was also seeking justice for what she viewed as an avoidable death. She showed me a...
Viewpoint
07.27.20
Pandemic Responses Suffer from Common Ailments
As the world continues to reel from the COVID-19 pandemic, the onslaught of new developments, disrupted routines, and fast-evolving medical research and advice trap us in a kind of eternal present. Each day feels unprecedented. But, at least since...
Viewpoint
07.02.20
It’s True That Democracy in China Is in Retreat, But Don’t Give up on It Now
China’s popularity in the world is plummeting, and antagonism between China and the United States is growing. Many blame China for allowing a series of new viruses to emerge, for failing to stop COVID-19 when it first appeared, and for not sharing...
Viewpoint
06.10.20
For Me, the Breakdown in U.S.-China Relations Is Personal
In my childhood, they were the Red Chinese. In my husband’s upbringing, we were the American imperialists. U.S.-China reconciliation after ping-pong diplomacy enabled us to meet and marry 40 years ago. Those of us with a foot in each world find the...
Postcard
06.05.20
Scallion Dutch Baby
The dishes I make myself flavor my moods, and season my experience of the news. As my birth country and my host country cast blame on one another, I eat four-cheese pizza with a side dish of blanched cauliflower seasoned with soy sauce, vinegar, and...
Viewpoint
05.21.20
A New U.S. ‘Consensus’ on China May Not Be as Solid as It Appears
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought ties between Washington and Beijing to their lowest level since the countries normalized relations in 1979, with many observers warning that they have entered into either “a new Cold War” or at least “a new type of...
Viewpoint
05.21.20
How Will Historians Look Back at the Coronavirus Outbreak?
Imagine that a historian decides to reflect on the pandemic, asking quite simply, “How did it come to this?” There would be many ways of telling that story. But one way would be to chart a series of off-ramps on the road to disaster. Some of these...
Viewpoint
04.03.20
‘We’re Hardly Heroic’
Dr. Li, a heart specialist at Wuhan No. 4 Hospital, spent the third week of March preparing for the reopening of the hospital’s general clinics, which closed on January 22, when No. 4 became a key facility for treating COVID-19 patients. After...
Features
03.20.20
‘My Epitaph Only Needs One Phrase: He Spoke up Once for People.’
Translator’s IntroductionOn February 7, the day Li Wenliang died from coronavirus, a piece of farewell prose written in the first person emerged online. Li was a Chinese doctor whose efforts as early as December 30 to warn colleagues of the outbreak...
Viewpoint
03.20.20
Xi Jinping May Welcome Trump’s Racism
The coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new low-point for the already strained relationship between the U.S. and China—and it could get worse in the months ahead as the toll rises and there is more urgency to assign blame. At the White House press...