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06.04.14Remarks by President Obama at at 25th Anniversary of Freedom Day
Office of the Press Secretary
Barack Obama reminds Poles that while they voted for democracy twenty-five years ago this day, China crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
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06.04.14As China Booms, So Does Popular Unrest
CBS News
In the quarter-century since the crackdown in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, China's economy has thrived and presented the world with an historic milestone. But at what cost to its people?
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06.04.14In Pictures, Remembering the Tiananmen Square Massacre
Mashable
Twenty-five years ago on Wednesday, the Chinese government, acting under martial law, deployed 200,000 troops into Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
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06.04.14Tiananmen at Twenty-Five: "Victory Over Memory"
New Yorker
Today, technology and globalism are prying open the lives of China’s people. But, in matters of politics and history, the Party is determined to silence even the “few flies” that Deng Xiaoping once described as a bearable side effect of an open...
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06.04.14Hong Kong Recalls Tiananmen Killings, China Muffles Dissent
Reuters
Tens of thousands of people held a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong to mark the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters 25 years ago in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, while mainland China authorities sought to whitewash the event.
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06.03.14Marking 25th Anniversary of China's Tiananmen Square Takes Creativity
Los Angeles Times
Every year, political activists try to commemorate those who died in the 1989 crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese government tries to prevent them, a cat-and-mouse game as classic as "Tom and Jerry."
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06.03.14Stuart Franklin: How I Photographed Tiananmen Square and 'Tank Man'
Guardian
The Magnum photographer tells his story of the 1989 protests, from peaceful demonstration to bloody crackdown, the iconic 'tank man' – and how hamburgers gave him his big break.
Media
06.03.14A Day to Remember/A Day Forgotten
China’s suppression of the memory of the June 4 massacre of demonstrators in Beijing in 1989 is a perennial and important subject of commentary. Much written on the subject is excellent, but little I’ve seen describes repressed memory in action as...
Viewpoint
06.03.14China’s Maritime Provocations
Last weekend I attended the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual gathering of Asian, European, and American defense and military officials and strategic experts in Singapore hosted by the London International Institute of Strategic Studies. China sent a...
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06.03.14China Follows USA With Emissions Pledge
USA Today
One day after the United States said it would slash carbon emissions from existing power plants by 30% below 2005 levels, China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, said it would set an absolute cap on its emissions by 2016.
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06.03.14China Swaps Gusto for Rigor as It Learns From Africa
Bloomberg
Cowed by capricious commodity prices, political instability and a string of lost investments, Chinese financiers aren’t as gutsy as when state-owned giants whipped up business abroad 15 years ago.
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06.03.14Tiananmen, Forgotten
New York Times
To my generation, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades.
Culture
06.03.14A Visit to Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum
Every Saturday in Hong Kong, volunteer curator and translator C.S. Liu helps guide visitors through the first permanent museum dedicated to the history of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989 in Beijing.At the entrance to the June 4th...
Features
06.03.14Voices from Tiananmen
This Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of the deadly suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests on June 4. It has been a quarter of a century of enormous change in China, but one key fact of life in that country has not changed: its leaders...
The NYRB China Archive
06.03.14The Tanks and the People
from New York Review of Books
Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.”My father knew what he was talking about. His courage had been broken, by countless political campaigns...
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06.02.14Tales of Army Discord Show Tiananmen Square in a New Light
New York Times
In a stunning rebuke to his superiors, Major General Xu Qinxian said the Tiananmen protests were a political problem and should be settled through negotiations, not force.
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06.02.14China Escalating Attack on Google
New York Times
The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
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06.02.14Malaysia Seeks Code of Conduct for South China Sea
Wall Street Journal
Malaysia urged a rapid conclusion to creating a long-stalled code of conduct in the South China Sea, as tensions grow over conflicting territorial ambitions in Asian waters between Beijing and neighboring countries.
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06.02.1425 Years After the Tiananmen Crackdown
Creative Time Reports
The Asian American Arts Centre responded to the June 1989 events with an open-call exhibition of artworks related to the uprising and its suppression called “China: June 4, 1989.” To commemorate the event's 25th anniversary, Creative Time...
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06.02.14A Media Mogul, Alone on the Island
Foreign Policy
Hong Kong's fiery beacon of the free press, Apple Daily, is under threat from shadowy forces. Can it survive if Beijing wants it dead or quiet?
Conversation
06.02.1425 Years On, Can China Move Past Tiananmen?
Xu Zhiyuan:Whenever the massacre at Tiananmen Square twenty-five years ago comes up in conversation, I think of Faulkner’s famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Some believe that China’s economic growth and rise to international...
Video
06.02.14Cairo in Chinese
When Shen Yitong left her home in China to study French at Cairo University in 2008, she didn’t know that she would come to think of Egypt as a second home, or that she would see revolution come upon the country so suddenly. Her parents came from...
The NYRB China Archive
06.02.14‘You Won’t Get Near Tiananmen!’: Hu Jia on the Continuing Crackdown
from New York Review of Books
Hu Jia is one of China’s best-known political activists. He participated in the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a fifteen-year-old, studied economics, and then worked for environmental and public health non-governmental organizations. A practicing...
Reports
06.01.14Decoding China’s Emerging “Great Power” Strategy in Asia
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
The course charted by China’s reemergence as a great power over the next few decades represents the primary strategic challenge for the U.S.-Japan security alliance and for the East Asian security landscape writ large. If China’s economic, military...
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05.31.14American Businesses in China Feel Heat of a Cyberdispute
New York Times
Chinese officials are ramping up political and economic pressure on the United States following indictments against five members of the Chinese Army on charges of economic cyberespionage.
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05.30.1425 Years On, No Fading of Tiananmen Wounds, Ideals
Associated Press
While China's economy, society and cities have transformed in the last 25 years, Tiananmen demonstrators and their supporters are keen to remind the world that other things haven't changed.
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05.30.14Abe’s Attempt to Corner China Through Diplomacy
Diplomat
Japan is reaching out to Southeast Asia and seeking to control the discourse around its new security policy.
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05.30.14Obama Says the U.S. Will Lead the World for the Next 100 Years. China Disagrees.
Washington Post
The Global Times, China’s state-run nationalist-leaning newspaper, later challenged that view, asking, “America wants to lead the world for another 100 years, but with what?”
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05.29.14China Scrambles to Adjust to Baby Boomlet
Wall Street Journal
China's health officials are taking steps to accommodate two million more births annually after a landmark decision last year to relax population controls.
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05.29.14Missing Plane Believed to Be Beyond Search Area
New York Times
The search area in the Indian Ocean that recovery teams have been scouring for more than a month is probably not the final resting place of a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner.
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05.29.14India’s Modi and China’s Xi: Frenemies, or Just Plain Enemies?
Time
With two nationalists in power, relations between the world’s two most populous nations could turn even frostier.
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05.28.14China is Stealing a Strategic March on the US
Financial Times
Bit by bit Beijing is creating new facts, and with each incident, it throws down the gauntlet.
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05.28.14China’s Two Problems with the Uyghurs
Los Angeles Review of Books
Beijing has two problems with the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking, Central Asian people from China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. One problem is terrorism; the other problem is civil rights.
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05.28.14China Cleans Up the Internet by Squelching Dissent
Businessweek
A new government campaign aims to crack down on spreading “rumors” and harmful information through chat groups on instant messaging services such as Tencent’s WeChat.
Excerpts
05.28.14‘Staying’—An Excerpt from ‘People’s Republic of Amnesia’
Zhang Ming has become used to his appearance startling small children. Skeletally thin, with cheeks sunk deep into his face, he walked gingerly across the cream-colored hotel lobby as if his limbs were made of glass. On his forehead were two large,...
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05.28.14China Sentences 55 in Xinjiang Mass Trial
Reuters
The public sentencing, reminiscent of China's revolutionary era rallies, attracted a crowd of 7,000 at a sports stadium in Yining city in the northern prefecture of Yili.
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05.27.14ChinaFile Recommends
05.27.14Why Vietnam Can’t Count on Its Neighbors to Rally Against China
Businessweek
China knows Vietnam can do little to stop it; while an appeal by Vietnam to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations could make the fight more equal, it’s not likely to be very effective.
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05.27.14China Said to Deport Models for Working Illegally
New York Times
Chinese authorities have deported scores of foreign models whom they detained earlier this month in Beijing on accusations that the models were working illegally, said a model who once worked in China.
Caixin Media
05.27.14Threats to Anonymous Sources Shake Chinese Journalism
Courts in the capital are mulling over what's being described as the first legal attack against the use of anonymous sources in news reports published by the Chinese media.The charges leveled against the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend...
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05.27.14International China Welcomes New Indian Government
Associated Press
China is "ready to work with the new Indian government to maintain high-level contact, strengthen cooperation and communication in all areas," former Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told Ambassador Ashok Kumar Kantha.
Features
05.27.14China’s Experiment with Deliberative Democracy
Chinese pro-democracy protests begun in the late spring of 1989 led to the brutal military suppression on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 25 years ago this June 4. Around the world, discussions of the events of that spring have been well underway for...
The China Africa Project
05.27.14China’s New Diplomatic Strategy in Africa: Humility
Just a few weeks after Chinese premier Li Keqiang admitted that China was going through “growing pains” in its engagement with Africa, Beijing’s central bank chief, Zhou Xiaochuan, acknowledged some of the 2,500 PRC companies operating in Africa are...
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05.26.14China's Beachhead in U.S. Schools
Wall Street Journal
The Confucius education network shows the promise and peril of doing academic business with Beijing.
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05.23.14US Wins WTO Luxury Car Ruling Against China
BBC
The World Trade Organization found no basis for duties that China imposed on saloons and off-road vehicles between 2011 and 2013 in retaliation for US trade policies.
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05.23.14Residents Try to Move On After Terrorist Attack in China
New York Times
By the time the vehicles exploded at opposite ends of the block, 43 people were dead and more than 90 people were wounded, according to an updated casualty list.
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05.23.14Special Report: The Power Struggle Behind China's Corruption Crackdown
Reuters
When Xi Jinping was named President in March last year, the 48-year-old billionaire Liu Han was detained and surrounded by corruption investigators and prison guards.
Media
05.23.14“What’s Been Done to My Beautiful Homeland?”
Nigel Maiti, an ethnically Uighur host for Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, is a well-known and popular entertainer with more than 1 million followers on the social media site Sina Weibo. After 31 were killed by a coordinated bomb and truck attack at...
The NYRB China Archive
05.22.14The Smooth Path to Pearl Harbor
from New York Review of Books
In mid-February, as part of the plans for his official visit to Germany, Chinese President Xi Jinping asked to visit one of Berlin’s best-known sites: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The request was declined when it became...
Books
05.22.14Age of Ambition
From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals—fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture—consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth?Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail. —Farrar, Straus, and Giroux {chop}
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05.22.14Vietnam PM Says Considering Legal Action Against China Over Disputed Waters
Reuters
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said his government was considering various "defense options" against China, including legal action, following the deployment of a Chinese oil rig to South China Sea waters Hanoi also claims.
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05.22.14China and Russia: Best Frenemies
Economist
Does the new collaboration between Russia and China amount to a renewal of the alliance against America?
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05.22.14China Threatens Security Checks for Tech Firms After U.S. Indictments
New York Times
China will establish new procedures to assess potential security problems with Internet technology and services used by sectors “related to national security and the public interest.”
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05.22.14UglyGorilla Hacker Left Tracks, U.S. Cyber-Hunters Say
Bloomberg
Prosecutors building a case against Wang Dong, one of five Chinese military hackers indicted for economic espionage, were helped by Wang’s apparent willingness to break a cardinal rule of spying: Leave no tracks.
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05.21.14“The Big Bang Theory” and Our Future with China
New Yorker
The United States has never faced a rival whose ordinary people lead lives that have so much in common with ours in America. (The Soviets did not get Carson.)
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05.21.14Ex JPMorgan China banker questioned in HK
Financial Times
Hong Kong authorities have interviewed Fang Fang, JPMorgan Chase’s former head of investment banking in China, as they investigate government bribery allegations.
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05.21.14Under Pressure, ‘Naked Official’ Chooses Early Retirement
New York Times
How China is dealing with its longstanding problem of “naked officials”—those who have packed off their family and, often, ill-gotten wealth abroad.
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05.21.14Russia Signs 30-Year Gas Deal with China
BBC
Russia's President Vladimir Putin has signed a multi-billion dollar, 30-year gas deal with China, 10 years in the making, and worth some $400 billion.
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05.21.14China’s Xi Issues Veiled Warning to Asia Over Military Alliances
Reuters
Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared to warn some Asian nations about strengthening military alliances to counter China, saying this would not benefit regional security.
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05.21.14China Accuses U.S. of Hypocrisy Amid Charges of Economic Espionage
Al Jazeera
Unresolved allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on a Chinese telecoms giant Huawei have resurfaced amid growing anger from Chinese officials over accusations that the PLA hacked American databases.