Media
06.25.13China’s “Urban Enforcers” Caught in a Vicious Cycle
Last week, another anecdote about chengguan— China’s urban enforcers whose main tasks include enforcing urban beautification ordinances and cracking down on unlicensed street vendors— caught the public’s attention. On June 15, a web user called @岔巴子...
Caixin Media
06.25.13Spoon Half Full for China’s Rural School Kids
A 2010 survey of boarding school students in four of China’s poorest counties found hunger pangs, malnutrition and stunted growth appallingly common.Some 72 percent of the more than 1,000 students questioned for the China Development Research...
Caixin Media
06.25.13Legal, Economic Reforms Important At Coming Party Session
China’s blueprint for economic reform is finally taking shape. The government has appointed a taskforce to draft the plans, ahead of the third plenary meeting of the 18th Central Committee. With the country’s economy at the crossroads, these plans...
Environment
06.20.13China’s GM Soybean Imports Stir Up Controversy
from chinadialogue
Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, has been awash with criticisms of the Ministry of Agriculture’s decision to green light imports of three more strains of genetically modified (GM) soybeans. A picture ...
Culture
06.18.13“Walk A Pig on My Bike (2012)”
“Walk A Pig on My Bike (2012),” from their double-disc second album Some Other Scenery (2012), is a new rendition of an earlier song by the Guangzhou-based folk band Wu Tiao Ren. The twenty-one songs from this album (nineteen, including this one,...
Culture
06.18.13“Water Runs East for Ten Years, Water Runs West for Ten Years”
“Water Runs East for Ten Years, Water Runs West for Ten Years” is a song by the Guangzhou-based folk band Wu Tiao Ren from their first album, A Tale of Haifeng (2009). The songs on this album celebrate the sentiments and everyday lives of small-town...
Culture
06.18.13The Local Folk
In the liner notes of their 2009 début album, A Tale of Haifeng, Guangzhou-based indie folk band Wu Tiao Ren tinkered with the Communist party slogan “Lizu xiancheng, fangyan quanqiu,” which translates roughly: “See the world from our county’s...
Caixin Media
06.18.13Will Bond Market Tidying Trigger Clean Sweep?
China’s financial regulators are rewriting rules for the interbank bond market after criminal investigations early this year led to the arrests of several well-known bond traders and exposed serious flaws in the market’s supervision system.The...
Media
06.17.13Do Quotas in China’s College Admissions System Reinforce Existing Inequalities?
Earlier this month, millions of Chinese students took the exam for which they had been preparing their entire lives—the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, known colloquially as the gaokao. For some, the process was more arduous than for...
Media
06.12.13In Box Office Hit, American Dream Is Still Alive—In a Maturing China
Over the last two weeks, the movie American Dreams in China (中国合伙人) has been the number one box office hit in China, selling over 400 million tickets to date. The movie is a gritty and at times tongue-in-cheek comedy that tells the true story of...
Media
06.11.13Chinese Web Users React to U.S. National Security Agency Surveillance Program
The online reactions to the PRISM incident, in which the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been revealed to conduct a far-ranging surveillance program affecting many both in the U.S. and abroad, have been as fascinating as the event itself...
Media
06.07.13Can Animation Cure What Ails the Chinese Movie Industry?
“Gold rush.” “1920s Hollywood.” “Faster than a speeding bullet.” These are a few ways that film professionals have described China’s booming movie industry. China’s film market, the second-largest in the world, grossed roughly U.S.$2.7 billion in...
Features
06.06.13Bad Medicine
In 1967, as the United States sank into war in the jungles of Vietnam and China descended into the cataclysm of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese soldiers secretly fighting alongside the North Vietnamese also battled swarms of malarial mosquitoes...
Environment
06.06.13Wuxi-Düsseldorf and the Challenge of Green City Partnerships
from chinadialogue
At first glance, it isn’t an obvious pairing. Düsseldorf is the fashion and advertising capital of Germany. Wuxi is a fast-growing industrial city on China’s east coast, with probably more coal plants than catwalks. But a German environmental think-...
Viewpoint
06.05.13A Re-Opening to China?
Five months into his second term, President Obama is about to undertake the most important diplomatic initiative of his presidency: an effort to reshape the relationship with China. With little fanfare thus far but considerable boldness on both...
Media
06.04.13On Eve of Tiananmen Anniversary, China’s Prominent Weiborati Speak Out
“Don’t worry about forgetfulness—at least the Sina censors remember,” tweeted Jia Zhangke, a film director.Like 2013, 1989 was the year of the Snake on the Chinese calendar. It was also a year that Chinese authorities prefer not to remember. On the...
Media
06.03.13Online Outrage After Chinese City Proposes Fine on Single Mothers
Women giving birth out of wedlock in China have to contend with family pressure, social stigma, and financial hardship. Now, some of them may have to pay a hefty fine as well.Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million people in Central China, posted a...
Caixin Media
06.03.13Trading Companies and the Business of Illusion
Last year, the owner of an export-processing company whom we will call Lin Minyao learned of an easy way to make money in Shenzhen, the port city next to Hong Kong.Like his fellow traders, Lin said he could set up two shell companies, one in Hong...
Environment
05.30.13China’s “NIMBY” Protests: Sign of Unequal Society
from chinadialogue
NIMBY—or “not in my backyard”—protests happen when residents attempt to protect their neighborhoods from the negative impacts of public or industrial facilities. Since the 2007 “walking protests” against a PX chemical factory in Xiamen, we have seen...
Media
05.29.13The Graffiti Seen ‘Round the World
It’s tourist season the world over: let the shenanigans begin. After a young Chinese tourist’s defacement of an ancient Egyptian temple was photographed and shared online, the harsh backlash has gone viral in China’s blogosphere. Tea Leaf Nation...
Media
05.28.13Trending on Weibo: #AIDSPatientsCanBeTeachers#
In the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, carriers of the AIDS virus are now allowed to teach schoolchildren. The recently-announced change in regulations marks a step forward for AIDS activists, with the hashtag #AIDSPatientsCanBeTeachers# now...
Environment
05.28.13How China Can Kick-start Carbon Capture and Storage
from chinadialogue
China’s estimated total carbon dioxide emissions reached 25 percent of global emissions in 2011 and they continue to grow rapidly—so rapidly, in fact, that the increase in China’s emissions over an eight-month period is...
Caixin Media
05.25.13Honeymoon’s Over for Sweethearts of SOE Reform
Corporate wedding bells were ringing in 2011 when a trust controlled by insurer Ping An Insurance Group forged a partnership with a Shanghai-based cosmetics maker called Jahwa Group and its listed subsidiary, Jahwa United.The tie-up was duly praised...
Environment
05.23.13Food Safety Scandals Bring Reality-Check to “Chinese Dream”
from chinadialogue
In the wake of China’s recent food scandal, Chinese premier Li Keqiang has vowed to enforce the toughest food safety regulations.“We need to crack down on practices that violate laws and regulations with a heavy fist, and make the lawbreakers pay an...
Media
05.22.13On “Strange Stones,” a Discussion with Peter Hessler
On May 21st at the Asia Society in New York City, Peter Hessler, author of the recently published Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, discussed his book and a decade of writing about China and elsewhere with author, Michael Meyer and...
Environment
05.20.13Water-Trading Could Exacerbate Water Shortages in China
from chinadialogue
Large-scale engineering projects and rigorous state control are hallmarks of the Chinese developmental model, and both have been apparent in the country’s approach to water management.A US$62 billion project to divert water from the south to the...
Caixin Media
05.20.13Errors of Aggression Catch up with Underwriter
Ping An Securities Co. has been slapped with a fine by the securities regulator and will lose its stock underwriting license for three months because of its sloppy work in underwriting the initial public offering of a company that turned out to be a...
Environment
05.17.13China Tops Table for Disaster-Induced Displacement of People
from chinadialogue
More than a third of all people forced from their homes by disasters such as floods, storms, and earthquakes in the past five years were in China, says a new report from the leading international body on displacement.Around 49.8 million Chinese...
Media
05.17.13Chinese Anxiety—In Debate About Overwork, a Glimpse of Shifting Expectations
Almost half of all Chinese report feeling “more anxiety” now than they did five years ago. What, exactly, is driving these concerns, or increasing reports of these concerns? Avid followers of China-related news might immediately think of censorship...
Environment
05.16.13Singapore’s Growth Story Holds Lessons for Water-Scarce China
from chinadialogue
When the tiny city-state of Singapore gained independence in 1965, its social, economic, political, and environmental constraints appeared so formidable that many of those looking in from outside predicted a future of dismal dimensions.Forty years...
Viewpoint
05.13.13Maoism: The Most Severe Threat to China
Ma Licheng (马立诚) is a former Senior Editorials Editor at People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s most important mouthpiece, and the author of eleven books. In 2003, when Japan’s then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine...
Caixin Media
05.13.13Competitors Try Curbing China Mobile’s 4G Urge
The wireless Internet technology race is intensifying a longstanding rivalry between China’s largest mobile phone operator, China Mobile, and its smaller competitors China Telecom and China Unicom.Since 2011, China Mobile customers in fifteen cities...
Media
05.10.13Unrest in Beijing Over Mysterious Death of Young Woman
A rare protest in Beijing involving hundreds of people was documented by photos posted on China’s social media (scroll down to see a sample photo). The cause of the protest was the death of a twenty-two-year-old migrant worker, who fell several...
Media
05.09.13Truth in Chinese Cinema?
In 1997, as James Cameron’s Titanic sank box office records around the world—including in China—Sally Berger, assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, worked to bring New York moviegoers a raft of Chinese movies they’d never heard of.The...
Culture
05.09.13“I Just Want to Write”
Whether or not I deserved the Nobel Prize, I already received it, and now it’s time to get back to my writing desk and produce a good work. I hear that the 2013 list of Nobel Prize nominees has been finalized. I hope that once the new laureate is...
Media
05.07.13Rat Meat Masquerading as Lamb—Yet Another Food Safety Scandal
Rat meat + gelatin + red food coloring + nitrates = lamb. Have you tried it yet?“This is what a ‘complete’ sheep looks like,” reads a caption under the photoshopped image of a sheep with Jerry, the mouse from Tom and Jerry, as its head. The image...
Caixin Media
05.04.13Earth Moves, China Rallies
Rapeseed was ripening in the lush fields ringing the village of Renjia when a local farmer, forced from his home, stepped into the sea of green stalks and pitched a tent.Less than a day earlier, the farmer and each of his more than 3,000 neighbors...
Environment
05.03.13Time to End Secrecy Over Chinese Overseas Fishing
from chinadialogue
It is well-known that overseas fishing fleets are more cavalier in terms of respect for laws and regulations than their domestic counterparts. There are innumerable examples from all over the world of fishing with gears that are not part of...
Media
05.01.13The Wall Street Journal: Covering China Past and Present
The Wall Street Journal was one of the first American publications to set up a bureau in Beijing. Since its establishment, scores of the Journal’s correspondents have traveled in and out of the country to cover China’s economic and political...
Media
05.01.13The Long Battle Over “White Pollution”
In the past weeks, Chinese citizens have learned that the styrofoam boxes from which they eat their lunches will soon be legal. On February 16, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s highest economic policy-making body,...
Environment
04.30.13Why Has Water-Rich Yunnan Become A Drought Hotspot?
from chinadialogue
Yunnan’s drought continues. During China’s annual parliamentary session in March, the deputy party secretary of the southwest Chinese province, Qiu He, blamed spring floodwaters that flow through Yunnan and on into other countries for the water...
Environment
04.28.13Poor Rural Residents in China Seen as Easy Target for Environmental Lawsuits
from chinadialogue
China today boasts a collection of ninety-five environmental courts, all of which were set up over the past six years. It is a trend that promises to re-shape Chinese environmental law.But simply trumpeting this initiative is no guarantee the...
Caixin Media
04.27.13Cracking Down on Bond Market’s Knotty Traders
It was a typical workday morning at Wanjia Asset Management Co. in Shanghai’s downtown financial district, but the firm’s star bond trader Zou Yu was not at his desk.Zou, 31, had mysteriously failed to report for his job as head of Wanjia’s fixed-...
Media
04.26.13Making a Show of the News?
In what seemed like a flash on April 20, Chinese netizens dubbed TV reporter Chen Ying “the most beautiful bride” on China’s Internet. It was the day of her wedding but a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Ya’an in Sichuan province and Chen didn’t bother...
Viewpoint
04.26.13Sino-American Relations: Amour or Les Miserables?
Winston Lord, former United States Ambassador to China, tells us he recently hacked into the temples of government, pecking at his first-generation iPad with just one finger—a clear sign that...
Environment
04.22.13Why It’s Time to End China-Bashing on the Environment
from chinadialogue
The major impact that international summits and treaties have had on China’s environmental governance is often overlooked. Environmental protection first emerged as an issue in China in 1972, after the country dispatched a delegation to the U.N...
Caixin Media
04.22.13Heading off a China-style Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Warning of local governments’ high exposure to bad debts, the credit agency Fitch recently downgraded China’s long-term local-currency rating from AA– to A+. Officials should take note: the downgrade underlines how closely international markets are...
Media
04.22.13Social Media’s Role in Ya’an Earthquake Aftermath is Revealing
China’s social media was in mourning yesterday as users turned their profile photos to grey in remembrance of the victims of the 7.0 earthquake that struck the Ya’an region in Sichuan province on Saturday. As of April 22, the death toll has risen to...
Caixin Media
04.20.13Bird Flu’s Latest Talons Force Fresh Defense
A surprise attack by a new strain of the bird flu virus has forced Chinese authorities into the trenches for a two-pronged defense against unseen enemies.The primary threat is the deadly virus that scientists identified as a new strain of H7N9. It...
Environment
04.16.13Morococha: The Peruvian Town the Chinese Relocated
from chinadialogue
The headlines have been stark: a Chinese mining company moves an entire Peruvian town of 5,000 people five miles down the road to make way for its new mine.It sounds like another story about an extractive corporation riding roughshod over local...
Caixin Media
04.15.13China Export Policy Chokes on Vitamin Verdict
Internet cafés covered by the city of Wuhan’s Internet Café Association agreed to set minimum prices for online access nearly a decade ago. And more than one hundred coking coal company-members of the Coke Association of Shanxi Province each agreed...
Caixin Media
04.15.13Tencent Lets WeChat’s Rapid Growth Do the Talking
Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s free messaging service, WeChat, has seen its popularity grow among both individual users and businesses, even amid a dispute with the Big Three telecom operators [China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom].Since launching...
Media
04.12.13Leftist Hawks and Conspiracy Theorists: The People’s Liberation Army’s Online Presence
Is Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, turning into a new war zone? Dai Xu, a colonel in the Chinese Air Force and military strategist, thinks so.“A month ago, a pseudo-Japanese devil [derogatory term for pro-Japan Chinese] at Shanghai’s Fudan University...
Earthbound China
04.11.13Moving House: Preserving Huizhou’s Vernacular Architecture
In 1996, art historian Nancy Berliner, working with the Peabody Essex Museum, purchased a vacant Qing dynasty merchant’s house from the Huizhou region of China and, piece by piece, moved it to the United States to be meticulously reconstructed at...
Earthbound China
04.11.13There Goes the Neighborhood
When, in 1996, art historian Nancy Berliner purchased a late Qing dynasty merchants’ house from Huangcun, a village in Anhui province, it was just one ordinary house among thousands like it in the picturesque Huizhou region of China. It took...
Environment
04.10.13Writing Yunnan a Rubber Check
Our van stopped at a scenic vista on the contour road where verdant mountains undulated southward toward China’s border with Laos. Stepping out to take some photos, I was overcome by an acrid, unpleasant odor. I asked my local travel partner, Xiao...
Caixin Media
04.08.13A Day in the Life of a Beijing “Black Guard”
After receiving his delayed wages, thirty-year-old Wang Jie decided to change professions.On March 7, he pressed a fingerprint onto a receipt that read: “Today I have received settlement of the 12,000 yuan in wages owed to me by Mr. Shao.”“Actually...
Viewpoint
04.05.13Christopher Hill on North Korea’s Provocations
The first months of 2013 have seen a rapid intensification of combative rhetoric and action from North Korea. In the sixteen months since Kim Jong-un assumed leadership of the country, North Korea has run through the whole litany of provocations his...
Viewpoint
04.04.13‘Hi! I’m Fang!’ The Man Who Changed China
In China in the 1980s, the word renquan (“human rights”) was extremely “sensitive.” Few dared even to utter it in public, let alone to champion the concept. Now, nearly three decades later, a grassroots movement called weiquan (“supporting rights”)...
Media
04.02.13China Concerto
Before February 2012, when his name exploded onto the front pages of newspapers around the globe, most people outside of China had never heard of Bo Xilai, the now-fallen Communist Party Secretary of the megacity of Chongqing. But in the years...