ChinaFile Recommends
12.12.13Foreign Correspondents in China Do Not Censor Themselves to Get Visas
Time
Compared with five years ago, when the Chinese leadership promised to ease restrictions on foreign journalists as part of reforms unveiled during the Beijing Olympics charm campaign, the atmosphere has clearly chilled.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.12.13China: Here Are Some Great Things About Toxic Air
Time
China's state-run TV tries to put a positive spin on toxic haze. Nice try, guys, nice try.
Media
12.11.13
Pollution Has ‘Five Surprising Benefits,’ says State TV, but Chinese Unamused
Polluted air is a fact of life for many Chinese citizens, and it’s currently smothering parts of the country—but that’s not all bad, according to one state media outlet’s widely-ridiculed attempt at positive spin. A recent bout of noxious smog has...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.10.13IKEA Toy Wolf Becomes Unlikely Anti-Government Symbol In Hong Kong
Huffington Post
An IKEA toy wolf whose name in Cantonese, Lo Mo Sai, sounds like the offensive phrase "mom’s c***," was thrown at Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying on Sunday. "Throw Lo Mo Sai" in Cantonese sounds like "f*** your...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.10.13Late to the Party? The U.S. Government’s Response to China’s Censorship
China Law & Policy
When China denied veteran journalist Paul Mooney’s visa request in November, neither the State Department, Administration officials nor anyone on Capitol Hill said anything publicly about a U.S. citizen appearing to be punished for his speech.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.10.13China’s Government Is Scaring Foreign Journalists Into Censoring Themselves
New Republic
The story of self-censorship in China is a quieter tale of unwritten articles, avoided topics and careful phrasing.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.10.13China’s Strong-Arm Tactics Toward U.S. Media Merit a Response
Washington Post
Chinese journalists get an open door to the United States. This reflects U.S. values and is fundamentally correct. If China continues to exclude and threaten American journalists, the U.S. should inject a little more symmetry into its visa policy.
Conversation
12.07.13
Will China Shut Out the Foreign Press?
Some two dozen journalists employed by The New York Times and Bloomberg News have not yet received the visas they need to continue to report and live in China after the end of this year. Without them, they will effectively be expelled from the...
Media
12.06.13
China’s Viral, Nationalist Screed Against Western Encroachment
“You are nothing without your motherland.” It’s a trite phrase, one that seems unlikely to stir the blood of even the most dyed-in-the-wool nationalist—but it has found recent currency in China. An essay with that title has been making the rounds on...
Media
12.04.13
Chinese Chortle at U.S. Request to Scrap Controversial Air Defense Zone
The United States wants China to pull back from its gambit to try to rewrite the East China Sea’s status quo, but the Chinese are having none of it. On December 2, the U.S. State Department said China’s newly-declared air defense identification zone...
Sinica Podcast
12.03.13
One Journalist’s Journey through China
from Sinica Podcast
This week, Kaiser and Jeremy are pleased to be joined by Isabel Hilton, a longstanding British journalist whose youthful interest in China got her blacklisted by the British security services and the British Broadcasting Corporation and redirected...
Media
11.25.13
Former Committee to Protect Journalists Honoree Says Bloomberg Chief Should Not Chair Press Freedom Dinner
A prominent Hong Kong-based journalist has called on Daniel Doctoroff, Chief Executive Officer of Bloomberg L.P., to step down from his role as chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) annual International Press Freedom Awards dinner...
Media
11.25.13
Chinese Netizens Applaud Beijing’s Aggressive New Defense Zone
Beijing has just thrown down the latest gauntlet in a long-simmering territorial dispute with Tokyo—and China’s citizens are cheering. On November 23, China’s Ministry of Defense released a map showing the “Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone,”...
Conversation
11.24.13
What Should the Next U.S. Ambassador to China Tackle First?
Mary Kay Magistad: Gary Locke succeeded in a way that few U.S. ambassadors to China have—in improving public perceptions of U.S. culture. Locke’s down-to-earth approachability and lack of ostentation certainly helped. So did the...
Media
11.22.13
Farewell, Everyman: Chinese React to Ambassador Locke’s Departure
Chinese are waving goodbye to the frustratingly normal U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, Gary Locke, who announced on November 20 that he will be leaving his post in early 2014. Over 300,000 netizens discussed Locke’s resignation on Sina Weibo, the...
Media
11.21.13
For Cash-Strapped Parents, Two Babies Are Too Many
Call it reproduction with Chinese capitalist characteristics. On November 15, authorities announced that the country’s One-Child Policy would be loosened, adding couples in which one spouse is an only child to the list of families allowed to have...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.21.13Bloomberg News Suspends Reporter Whose Article on China Was Not Published
New York Times
Award-winning Hong Kong-based Bloomberg reporter Michael Forsythe met with supervisors and was placed on leave, said two Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the situation, which was supposed to be private.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.17.13Hong Kong’s Gilded Cage Unfolds in ‘Bends’
Wall Street Journal
Flora Lau’s new movie began, as all her film projects do, with the director grabbing a handheld camera and wandering the streets of Hong Kong for inspiration.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.17.13Bloomberg Boots ‘China Leak’ Scribe
New York Post
Bloomberg News has put reporter Michael Forsthye, suspected of leaking news about a controversial China story on unpaid leave, escorting him from Bloomberg’s Hong Kong office on Nov. 14, sources said.
Media
11.14.13
Westerners Aren’t the Only Ones Flummoxed by China’s Reform Plans
After the Third Plenum, a high-level meeting to discuss China’s future, ended on November 12, Beijing released a major document likely to affect many of its 1.3 billion citizens’ lives for years. Western media responded to the 5,000-plus character...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.13.13The BBC’s New China Blog
BBC
On this page, our correspondents, producers and video journalists will bring you more stories from China, more background on the big issues and more about the smaller details of life here that tell you a lot about the country.
Conversation
11.12.13
Spiked in China?
Last weekend, The New York Times and later, The Financial Times reported that, according to Bloomberg News employees, Bloomberg editor in chief Matthew Winkler informed reporters by telephone on October...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.11.13China Story Yearbook 2013: Civilising China
China Story
“China Story Yearbook 2013” contains a rich range of translated material from Chinese sources related to politics, social change, urban transformation, law and order, international relations, the economy, the Internet, major news...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.11.13Minitrue: Chen Yongzhou Admits Accepting Bribes
China Digital Times
Directive from the Ministry of Truth to media: “New Express reporter Chen Yongzhou accepted bribes to publish a number of inaccurate reports. The media must use the full text of Xinhua News Agency wire copy regarding this incident, no...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13Another Massive Photoshop Fail in China
Foreign Policy
Social media in China lit up with mockery another obviously doctored image, this time posted on the Ninguo, Anhui government website, purporting to show vice-mayor Wang Hun pay a friendly visit to an elderly woman. &...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13China’s State Media Calls for Strong Action on Tiananmen Attack
Reuters
Chinese state media demanded severe punishment on October 31 after the government blamed militants from restive Xinjiang for an attack in Tiananmen Square, as the exiled leader of the region’s Uighur minority called for an independent probe.&...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13China Paper Issues Public Apology As Reporter ‘Confesses’ Bribery
NBC News
The New Express condemned its reporter Chen Yongzhou for “accepting money to publish a large number of false reports” just days after it ran unprecedented front-page editorials decrying police violation of press freedom and...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13Wikipedia China Becomes Front Line for Views on Language and Culture
New York Times
The Chinese-language version of Wikipedia has become more than an online encyclopedia: it is a battlefield for editors from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong in a region charged with political, ideological and cultural differences.&...
Media
11.07.13
After Party Headquarters Explosions, Netizens Debate Value of Violence
On the morning of November 6, an unknown assailant or group of assailants reportedly detonated several bombs outside the front door of the provincial government headquarters of Taiyuan, the capital of Northern China’s Shanxi province. China’s state-...
Media
11.07.13
Chinese State Media: U.S. Bullying ‘Obsolete’
Stop being a bully, and start respecting the rule of the global village. That’s the takeaway from a November 1 editorial in Chinese state media, which castigates the United States in the wake of revelations that the NSA has tapped the phones of...
Media
11.06.13
Sex Ed Videos Go Viral
A collection of sex education videos have just gone, ahem, viral on the Chinese Internet. On October 29, a three-person team calling itself the “Nutcracker Studio” released three one-minute clips addressing tough topics in childhood sex education,...
Media
11.05.13
China and Hollywood by the Numbers
Consider this: Hollywood studios now make more money selling movie tickets in China than in any other market outside North America. Wanda, China’s largest real estate developer, bought AMC, the second-largest movie theater chain in the United States...
Sinica Podcast
11.05.13
Terrorism in Tiananmen, Politics at Peking University
from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, we return to our China roots with a show covering recent developments in the news including the recent terrorist attack in Beijing and political hiring-and-firing at Peking University. Joining Kaiser and Jeremy to talk about...
Media
11.01.13
Apologies for a Horrific Past
On October 9, a farmer named Zhang Jinying appeared on the television show Please Forgive Me, a program usually dedicated to public apologies by unfaithful husbands and wayward sons. But the sixty-one-year-old Zhang’s apology had a depth and a...
Culture
11.01.13
The Sound of China’s Future
It’s high noon in March and the cluttered patio of Maria’s Taco Xpress, the Austin, Texas institution, is gloriously sunny. First time visitor Gan Baishui is moments away from his band’s American debut, but the composer and musician from a fourth-...
Viewpoint
11.01.13
What the Heck is China’s ‘Third Plenum’ and Why Should You Care?
China’s economy is already two-thirds the size of the economy of the U.S., and it’s been growing five times as fast. But now, China’s economy is beginning to slow and is facing a raft of difficult problems. If China’s leaders don’t address...
Media
10.31.13
Tiananmen Attack Spotlights China’s Beleaguered Uighurs
On October 28, a jeep plowed into a group of pedestrians and burst into flames on the avenue next to Tiananmen Square, the massive public square in Beijing that is the symbolic heart of the Chinese capital. According to Chinese state media reports,...
Conversation
10.30.13
Trial By TV: What Does a Reporter’s Arrest and Confession Tell Us About Chinese Media?
The latest ChinaFile Conversation focuses on the case of Chen Yongzhou, the Guangzhou New Express journalist whose series of investigative reports exposed fraud at the Changsha, Hunan-based heavy machinery maker Zoomlion. Chen later was arrested and...
Excerpts
10.28.13Stark Choices for China’s Leaders
One Beijing morning in early November 2012, seven men in dark suits strode onto the stage of the Great Hall of the People. China’s newly elected Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping stood at the center of the ensemble, flanked on each...
Caixin Media
10.28.13
How Police Got It So Wrong Arresting a Journalist
The arrest of a journalist for allegedly damaging the reputation of an equipment manufacturer has spurred debate in both the media and legal circles. The discussions revolve around the rights of the press, interpretation of the law, and possible...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.25.13Newspaper Publishes Front-Page Call for Journalist’s Release
Global Voices
A Guangzhou-based newspaper, the New Express, published a front-page editorial statement urging the Security Bureau of Hunan Province to release their investigative reporter Chen Yongzhou who was arrested for criminal...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.25.13China Is Getting Better at Influencing Media Outside China
Quartz
Freedom House says China is investing in a soft-power media push, like offering free editorial content to news organizations that can’t afford to send correspondents to China and publishing inserts of China Daily’s English edition in major...
Books
10.24.13
The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon
Over the years, China Digital Times (CDT) has collected hundreds of words and turns of phrase invented by China’s citizens of the Internet, its “netizenry.” Playfully evading online censors, netizens have created a world of “grass-mud horses” and “river crabs,” forever locked in battle in the “Mahler Desert.” CDT’s Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon is a collection of politically-charged terms which represent netizen resistance discourse. This eBook includes a selection of “classic” terms which have endured beyond the events which generated them. They are arranged by category, and indices in alphabetical order by both English and pinyin are included. This is the netizen language you need to know to understand China’s Internet. —China Digital Times{chop}
The NYRB China Archive
10.24.13
China: “Capitulate or Things Will Get Worse”
from New York Review of Books
The massacre of protesters in Beijing on June 4, 1989, and the harsh repression during the months immediately following put China into a foul mood. Among ordinary Chinese, the prestige of the Communist Party, whose leaders had ordered the brutal...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.23.13How to Say ‘Truthiness’ in Chinese
Foreign Policy
In the face of recent policies assaulting their right to speak out on the internet, grassroots Chinese are trying to turn the mirror back on officialdom by calling out instances where officials or state-owned media made statements that turned out to...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.23.13China’s Silly War on Starbucks Lattes
A C.C.T.V. investigation into Starbucks’ jacked-up prices in Mainland China has backfired, prompting many netizens to ask why the television station doesn’t cover more widespread and egregious injustices.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.23.13China to Announce Decision on Bo Xilai Appeal
Reuters
A court in eastern China said it would announce a decision on October 25 on whether to accept an appeal by ousted former senior politician Bo Xilai over his guilty verdict and life sentence on charges of bribery, corruption and...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.23.13Chinese Regulators Restrict Imports of T.V. Formats
Hollywood Reporter
The new order is aimed at pushing domestically produced and “morality-building programs,” in line with the recent campaign to decrease vulgarity on Chinese T.V. The vacated slots will have to be filled with news, education programs and...
Media
10.23.13
How to Say “Truthiness” in Chinese
“Official rumors” is more than just an oxymoron. The phrase—pronounced guanyao—has become a useful weapon in Chinese Internet users’ linguistic guerrilla warfare against government censorship. That battle has intensified during a government-led...
Reports
10.22.13
The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship
Center for International Media Assistance
This report provides a survey of the phenomenon of censorship and its recent evolution as it pertains to the news media sector, though similar dynamics also affect the film, literature, and performing arts industries. Specifically, this report...
Reports
10.22.13
CCTV’s International Expansion: China’s Grand Strategy for Media?
Center for International Media Assistance
China Central Television has come a long ways since its founding as a domestic party propaganda outlet in 1958. The domestic service has been supplemented by an international service, boasting three major global offices in Beijing, Washington, and...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.21.13China Holds Two Bloggers As It Expands Crackdown on Rumors
Reuters
Police in China have arrested an influential blogger and are holding a cartoonist in a widening crackdown on online “rumor-mongering”, friends and a lawyer for one of them said on Thursday October 17.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.21.13Busting China’s Bloggers
New York Times
The vast state censorship apparatus works hard to keep Chinese social media’s most influential bloggers down. But posts race through Weibo so quickly that it’s difficult to control them with technology. Hence, the government is resorting to...
Caixin Media
10.21.13
Is Freedom of Thought in China Just a Dream?
The Shanghai Free Trade Zone was recently launched. The measure is commonly regarded as an attempt by the leadership of the Communist Party to further economic reform, which has slowed over the past decade. It is also part of what policymakers call...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.21.13Seeing Its Own Money at Risk, China Rails at U.S.
New York Times
China has become shrill in its criticism of the fiscal train wreck in the United States, arguing that the answer to a potential government default is to begin creating a “de-Americanized world.”
ChinaFile Recommends
10.21.13Chinese Censors Crack Down on Cartoon Violence
Washington Post
In May, two young brothers from Jiangsu province were badly burned after being tied to a tree by a third boy and set alight – allegedly imitating a scene from the popular cartoon “Pleasant Goat and Big, Big Wolf.”
ChinaFile Recommends
10.21.13“Interesting From China”
New York Times
Sinosphere represents The Times’s latest attempt to overcome the challenges of getting a good handle on what’s happening in China by delivering timely, informative, engaging dispatches on everything their correspondents find “Interesting From China...
Media
10.17.13Journalist’s Call for ‘de-Americanized World’ Provokes Alarm in U.S., Fart Jokes in China
As fears mounted this week about a possible (and now, it seems, averted) U.S. government default, the U.S. press stumbled upon an October 13 editorial in Xinhua, China’s largest news agency, calling for a “de-Americanized...
Conversation
10.16.13
Uncomfortable Bedfellows: How Much Does China Need America Now?
Bill Bishop:The D.C. dysfunction puts China in a difficult place. Any financial markets turmoil that occurs because of a failure of Congress to do its job could harm China’s economy, and especially its exports. The accumulation of massive foreign-...
Viewpoint
10.16.13
Innovation in Britain and What it Means for China
On the occasion of a high-level British delegation’s visit to Beiing this week, Vincent Ni, the long-time New York-based U.S. correspondent for the independent Caixin Media group, shared his views about China’s ability to innovate relative to what...