ChinaFile Recommends
01.16.14Chinese Activists Test New Leader and Are Crushed
New York Times
Prominent activist, Xi Zhiyong, is indicted in a harsh warning to the New Citizens Movement.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.16.14Beijing Air Pollution At Dangerously High Levels
Associated Press
The PM2.5 density was calculated at 26 times higher than what is considered safe by the WHO.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.16.14In Rare Video, Wife of Jailed Nobel Laureate Reads Poems While Under House Arrest
New York Times
The video was filmed by the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a free-speech advocacy group established by Ms. Liu.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.15.14The People's Republic of Television Portraits from 1980's China
Time
“Soon, photographs of people and their televisions began appearing around China.”
ChinaFile Recommends
01.14.14Foxconn Reportedly Ships Nearly 1.5M iPhone 5s Units for China Mobile launch
Wall Street Journal
Apple sales slow in the face of competition from Samsung, Lenovo, Yulong and Huawei.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.14.14Chinese Drivers Pollute Without Guilt
Bloomberg
Chinese demand for private transportation soars while air-quality plummets.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.14.14China Pouring Billions into London Real Estate
China Daily
Chinese investment in London real-estate has risen 1,500 percent since 2010.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.14.14Chinese Theme Park Plans Replica Titanic (And Yes, It Will Hit an Iceberg)
Reuters
The $165 million project will be completed in two years.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.14.14‘Cultural Threats’ Among Five Focuses of New National Security Panel, Colonel Says
South China Morning Post
Government committee is established to manage western threats to cyber and national security.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.14.14Bowed and Remorseful, Former Red Guard Recalls Teacher’s Death
New York Times
“How a country faces the future depends in large part on how it faces its past,” said former Red Gaurd in public apology for past violence.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.13.14Is China's Economy Headed for a Crash?
Week
A growth model dependant on financial repression of the household sector has run out of steam.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.13.14White House Responds to Jimmy Kimmel’s China Controversy
Variety
A joke concerning the killing of Chinese people to avoid paying down U.S. debt was said live on ABC.
Media
01.10.14Shaq in China: A Love Story
At seven-foot-one, roughly 350 pounds, and with a smile that’s been featured on everything from cereal boxes to CD album covers, Shaquille O’Neal isn’t particularly hard to recognize. And yet there I stood at the airport arrival gate in Chongqing, a...
ChinaFile Recommends
01.09.14China Fines ‘House of Flying Daggers’ Director for Breaching One-child Policy
Guardian
Film-maker Zhang Yimou, who has three children with wife Chen Ting, has to pay £750,000 for breaking law.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.09.14Confucius Comes Home
New Yorker
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.08.14China Confronts the Online Rumor Mill
New York Times
(Op-ed) Hoewever unlikely, the best way of putting an end to Internet rumors is for the government to stop disseminating them.
Media
01.07.14Grand Theft China: Tase Corrupt Officials in New Online Game
Official corruption in China is a serious matter: In January 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping openly vowed to tackle it, and a 2013 Pew study found that fifty-three percent of Chinese consider it a “very big problem.” But fighting bribery,...
ChinaFile Recommends
01.07.14A New Exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum Puts a Modern Face on Chinese Art
Daily Beast
The art world has embraced the evolution of Western art, but when it comes to China, we seem stuck in the past. A new exhibit at the Met wants to shake up these stereotypes.
Media
01.03.14Coming to Chinese Headlines in 2014
Chinese people have spent another year breathing dirty air, fretting about food safety, poking fun at corrupt officials, and complaining about tightening censorship—but as a discerning consumer of international news, you probably knew that already...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.28.13China Introduces Shelters Where Parents Can Leave Babies Safely and Anonymously
Telegraph
The announcement of the baby shelter, literally the "baby abandonment island" in Chinese, provoked a national media outcry, this time with critics claiming that such a scheme would encourage more parents to dump their unwanted children.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.28.13China Formally Passes Law Easing One-Child Policy
Wall Street Journal
China's legislature on Saturday formally eased two restrictive social policies of its authoritarian system, allowing some couples to have a second child and ending a form of extralegal detention. The standing committee of the National People...
Other
12.26.132013 Year in Review
As the year draws to a close, we want to take a moment to look back at some of the stories ChinaFile published in 2013. We hope you’ll find something that interests you to read—or watch—over the holidays.It’s hard to remember a recent year that didn...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.26.13Chinese Netizens Give Max Baucus a Chinese Name
China Digital Times
The new U.S. Ambassador to China, Max Baucus, asked for suggestions for his Chinese name. Everyone unanimously replied, “Meikesi? Baokesi.” [“He hasn’t died of coughing? It’s guaranteed he’ll die of coughing.”]
ChinaFile Recommends
12.23.13Why Eating Chinese Food on Christmas is a Sacred Tradition for American Jews
Tablet
The Hebrew year is 5774 and the Chinese year is 4710. That must mean, the joke goes, that against all odds the Jews went without Chinese food for 1,064 years. In fact, Jewish love for Chinese food is neither hallucinated nor arbitrary. It is very...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.23.13Paying a Price to Cross China’s Border
Washington Post
For Chinese critics of the government, the border long ago acquired a political toll booth: Whichever way you cross, you pay a price.
Viewpoint
12.20.13‘Community Corrections’ and the Road Ahead for Re-Education Through Labor
Chinese and foreign observers welcomed the recent announcement that the Chinese government will “abolish”—not merely reform—the administrative punishment system known as re-education through labor (RTL). The proclamation, part of a sixty-point...
Sinica Podcast
12.20.13Rectifying Chinese Names
from Sinica Podcast
Living in a community of China watchers, we are unceasingly assaulted by words and phrases for which definitions are unclear, or ambiguous, or over which there is controversy or disagreement. And so, bearing Confucius’ admonition that the most...
Books
12.17.13Ping-Pong Diplomacy
The spring of 1971 heralded the greatest geopolitical realignment in a generation. After twenty-two years of antagonism, China and the United States suddenly moved toward a détente—achieved not by politicians but by Ping-Pong players. The Western press delighted in the absurdity of the moment and branded it “Ping-Pong Diplomacy.” But for the Chinese, Ping-Pong was always political, a strategic cog in Mao Zedong’s foreign policy. Nicholas Griffin proves that the organized game, from its first breath, was tied to Communism thanks to its founder, Ivor Montagu, son of a wealthy English baron and spy for the Soviet Union. Ping-Pong Diplomacy traces a crucial intersection of sports and society. Griffin tells the strange and tragic story of how the game was manipulated at the highest levels; how the Chinese government helped cover up the death of 36 million peasants by holding the World Table Tennis Championships during the Great Famine; how championship players were driven to their deaths during the Cultural Revolution; and, finally, how the survivors were reconvened in 1971 and ordered to reach out to their American counterparts. Through a cast of eccentric characters, from spies to hippies and Ping-Pong-obsessed generals to atom-bomb survivors, Griffin explores how a neglected sport was used to help realign the balance of worldwide power. —Scribner{chop}
Media
12.11.13Pollution 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...
The NYRB China Archive
12.10.13China: Five Pounds of Facts
from New York Review of Books
No one seems to have measured exactly how old Chinese civilization is, but Endymion Wilkinson can probably give a more precise answer than anyone else. “1.6 billion minutes separate us from the Zhou conquest of the Shang,” he informs us at the...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.04.13The AIDS Granny in Exile
Buzzfeed
In her one-bedroom apartment, Dr. Gao Yaojie — known to many as “the AIDS Granny” — moves with great difficulty through her tidy clutter and stacks of belongings. In the small kitchen, she stirs a pot of rice and bean porridge, one of the few things...
Media
11.27.13China’s Favorite Villainess
Many U.S. viewers identify with serial killer Morgan Dexter of Dexter, inveterate womanizer Don Draper of Mad Men, or family man turned meth kingpin Walter White of Breaking Bad—however morally bankrupt they may be. Now, China has its own anti-hero...
Culture
11.22.13A Homecoming
Shot in big cities and small towns across China in recent years, Shen Wei’s photographic project “Chinese Sentiment” is a personal journey to recapture bygone Chinese life in both private and public space. Born and raised in Shanghai, Shen Wei...
Excerpts
11.22.13Shen Wei’s ‘Chinese Sentiment’
When Shen Wei was growing up in Shanghai during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, his mother worked as a fashion designer who specialized in calendars. If a company wanted to publish one, they hired Shen Wei’s mother, and she designed clothes for...
Media
11.21.13For 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...
Culture
11.19.13Why You Should Read Pearl Buck’s ‘New’ Novel
When I first heard that The Eternal Wonder, a new novel by Pearl Buck, was scheduled for publication by Open Road Media on October 22 of this year, I assumed the announcement was either a mistake or a joke.Buck, of course, is the author of The Good...
Caixin Media
11.18.13What Do Investigative Reporters Do?
With the recent Chen Yongzhou scandal, many have called for an “investigation” into the investigative reporting business.I apply the term “investigative reporters” to those that often wade into the deeper, uncharted waters of the media’s realm. I...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.17.13China to Move Slowly on One-Child Law Reform
Wall Street Journal
China's family-planning agency is projecting a slow rollout for an easing of its one-child policy, underscoring reluctance by the government in moving too quickly to let some couples have two children and a law in place for decades.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.17.13China to Ease Longtime Policy of 1-Child Limit
New York Times
The Chinese government will ease its one-child family restrictions and abolish “re-education through labor” camps, significantly curtailing two policies that for decades have defined the state’s power to control citizens’ lives.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.17.13China Unveils Boldest Reforms in Decades, Shows Xi in Command
Reuters
China has relaxed its longstanding one-child policy and further freed up the markets in order to put the world's second-largest economy on a more stable footing.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.13.13China’s Communists Want Unattainable Goal of Affluence Without Freedom
Telegraph
The upcoming meetings on economic reform are a chance for China to break free of the "middle income trap", the fate of countless states in Latin America and around the world which all failed to make the switch in time to a grown-up growth...
Sinica Podcast
11.13.13Daoism for the Action-Oriented
from Sinica Podcast
{vertical_photo_right}What Would Confucius Do? What for that matter would Laozi not do? This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy ask these and other questions of Sam Crane, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Politics at Williams College and author of...
Culture
11.11.13All He Needs is a Miracle
Courtesy of the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History
A portrait of Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci by You Wenhui; painted at the time of Ricci’s death in Beijing, 1610. It now hangs at the Jesuit residence in Rome. It is the...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.11.13Activists Challenge Beijing by Going to Dinner
China Digital Times
On the last weekend of every month, government critics gather for unassuming meals in as many as 20 cities across the country to discuss issues from failures in the legal system to unequal access to education.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.11.13China’s Communist Party HQ Hit by Series of Explosions
Telegraph
Media reports claimed that improvised explosive devices packed with metal ball bearings and nails and concealed in roadside flowerbeds were detonated at around 7:40 in the morning in Taiyuan, the capital of coal-rich Shanxi province.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.11.13Explosions Kill 1, Injure 8 in North China City
Reuters
The official Xinhua news agency said what appeared to be small-scale bombs went off outside an office building of the Shanxi Provincial Committee of the Communist Party. Taiyuan is the capital of Shanxi province.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.11.13How China Profits From Our Junk
Atlantic
The son and grandson of scrap metalists, reporter Adam Minter traveled throughout the world to investigate how what we discard—and reuse—helps drive the global economy.
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
11.08.13Another 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
11.08.13Chinese Police Hunt for Two Xinjiang Men After Tiananmen Crash
Guardian
Chinese police are hunting for two or more men from the troubled region of Xinjiang amid growing suspicion that a fatal car crash and explosion in Tiananmen Square on Monday was a suicide attack.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13Police Examine Possible Xinjiang Link in Deadly Tiananmen Crash
New York Times
After the car crash in Tiananmen Square, Chinese authorities have now named two suspects from Xinjiang, the troubled western region whose ethnic Uighur population has become increasingly disenchanted with Chinese policies.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13Jeep Crash in China’s Tiananmen Square Leaves Five Dead
Guardian
Authorities have blamed separatist groups for stirring up trouble, but exiles and human right groups argue that the government has been too quick to identify violent incidents as the work of terrorists.
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.&...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13Unhinged in China
New York Review of Books
“A Touch of Sin” is made up of four interlocking stories that are meant to encompass the geographic sweep of China, and what director Jia Zhangke sees as the epidemic of violence and amorality in modern Chinese life.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.08.13Chinese University Defends Outspoken Teacher’s Firing
New York Times
In the week since Professor Xia Yeliang was dismissed, university officials have been buffeted by criticism that their decision was in retaliation for his activism against the government.
Media
11.07.13After 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-...
The NYRB China Archive
11.07.13How to Deal with the Chinese Police
from New York Review of Books
A casual visitor to China today does not get the impression of a police state. Life bustles along as people pursue work, fashion, sports, romance, amusement, and so on, without any sign of being under coercion. But the government spends tens of...
Books
11.06.13The Birth of Chinese Feminism
He-Yin Zhen (ca. 1884-ca.1920) was a theorist who figured centrally in the birth of Chinese feminism. Unlike her contemporaries, she was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global historical problems. This volume, the first translation and study of He-Yin’s work in English, critically reconstructs early twentieth-century Chinese feminist thought in a transnational context by juxtaposing He-Yin Zhen’s writing against works by two better-known male interlocutors of her time.The editors begin with a detailed analysis of He-Yin Zhen’s life and thought. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1874-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), to which He-Yin’s work responds and with which it engages. Jin, a poet and educator, and Liang, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that liberals like themselves should defend. He-Yin presents an alternative conception that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends. Ahead of her time, He-Yin Zhen complicates conventional accounts of feminism and China’s history, offering original perspectives on sex, gender, labor, and power that remain relevant today. —Columbia University Press{chop}