China Will Surpass U.S. As Leading Superpower

Greg Myre
NPR
Data from a Pew Research Center survey showed that in 23 of the 39 countries surveyed majorities or pluralities said China has or will overtake America. In China two-thirds believe their country already has or eventually will supplant...

Huge Chinese Theme-Park Project Aims to be the ‘Orlando of China’

Brady MacDonald
Los Angeles Times
The $2-billion marine-based Chimelong Ocean Kingdom theme park and resort on Hengqin Island is to be connected by bridge to Macau and by ferry to Hong Kong.  

Scandal in China Over the Museum with Over 40,000 Fake Artifacts

Jonathan Jones
Guardian
The recent revelation that museum in Hebei may be housing as many as 40,000 forgeries has caused the museum to close and many on the Chinese internet are commenting on the scandal.

Chinese Whistleblower Blinded in Acid Attack

Malcolm Moore
Telegraph
Li Jianxin, an amateur Chinese whistleblower who posted embarrassing pictures of Party officials’ luxury cars, was rammed by a car, blinded with acid, and had two of his fingers cut off.  

New Style in Old Beijing (Video)

Jonah M. Kessel
New York Times
This episode of the ‘Intersection’ video series takes place in Beijing’s Gulou neighborhood, where young Beijingers discuss their and their peers’ fashion styles and inspirations.

For Global Drug Manufacturers, China Becomes a Perilous Market

Katie Thomas
New York Times
Selling pharmaceuticals and other health care products in China is increasingly fraught with peril. China is accusing GlaxoSmithKline of funnelling payments through travel agents to doctors, hospitals and government officials to bolster...

Media

07.17.13

A Minority in the Middle Kingdom: My Experience Being Black in China

In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder: “…there is no racism in China because there are no black people,” a Chinese woman was reported...

From Beijing Alleyways to American Byways

Pallavi Aiyar
Los Angeles Review of Books
By zooming in close to specific moments at particular times in his characters’ histories Hessler reveals more about the broader context in which they live than conventional news reporting on subjects such as the Three Gorges Dam. 

Independent Thinking “Not Encouraged” in China’s Film Schools

Radio Netherlands Worldwide
The Chinese authorities have put an abrupt end to a training programme for aspiring independent filmmakers. And there’s still no official explanation why the 9th Edition of the Li Xianting Film School in Beijing was closed down. 

Caixin Media

07.16.13

As Red Cross Probe Stumbles, Critics See Red

Two box lunches—and nothing more. Yuan Yue says that’s what the Red Cross Society of China has frugally handed out so far to each member of a special committee assigned to investigate the charity group’s finances.But critics of the special board...

Golf in China Is Younger Than Tiger Woods, but Growing Up Fast

Brook Larmer
New York Times
China is producing some of the world’s best young golfers because wealthy families who have profited from the nation’s market reforms are replicating, in miniature, the formula of the socialist state sports system. 

‘Chinese Dream’ of a Young Couple in Chengdu [Video]

Linda Yueh
BBC
China’s economy has grown enormously over the past decade and its middle class is now estimated to number 150 million. The BBC’s Linda Yueh has been speaking to one couple from Chengdu on their desire to live the Chinese Dream. 

Media

07.10.13

Old Photo of Tiananmen Square Has Netizens Asking “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”

A rare old color photo of Tiananmen Square was posted on Weibo, China’s Twitter, and it was commented on hundreds of times as Internet users mused about the past and present of China’s most recognizable landmark.Here are the three things that stand...

Books

07.10.13

For a Song and a Hundred Songs

Liao Yiwu. Translated by Wenguang Huang
In June 1989, news of the Tiananmen Square protests and its bloody resolution reverberated throughout the world. A young poet named Liao Yiwu, who had until then led an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment. Like the solitary man who stood firmly in front of a line of tanks, Liao proclaimed his outrage—and his words would be his weapon. For a Song and a Hundred Songs captures the four brutal years Liao spent in jail for writing the incendiary poem “Massacre.” Through the power and beauty of his prose, he reveals the bleak reality of crowded Chinese prisons—the harassment from guards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts among human beings in close confinement, and the boredom of everyday life. But even in his darkest hours, Liao manages to unearth the fundamental humanity in his cell mates: he writes of how they listen with rapt attention to each other’s stories of criminal endeavors gone wrong and of how one night, ravenous with hunger, they dream up an “imaginary feast,” with each inmate trying to one-up the next by describing a more elaborate dish. In this important book, Liao presents a stark and devastating portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of China that outsiders rarely get to see. In the wake of 2011’s Arab Spring, the world has witnessed for a second time China’s crackdown on those citizens who would speak their mind, like artist Ai Weiwei and legal activist Chen Guangcheng. Liao stands squarely among them and gives voice to not only his own story, but to the stories of those individuals who can no longer speak for themselves. For a Song and a Hundred Songs bears witness to history and will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China.   —New Harvest

Filmmaker Du Bin Released on Bail

Sophie Beach
China Digital Times
Fimmaker, photographer and author Du Bin has been released after five weeks in detention in Beijing. On May 31, Du disappeared from his apartment in Beijing and was held by the police. Du was released on...

A Chinese City is Asking Its Companies to Pay Public Sector Salaries Because It Can’t Afford Them

Jake Maxwell Watts
Quartz
Local government debt is now so unwieldy in China that some desperate city governments, such as that of western Ordos, have turned to the private sector for help to pay their employees. 

China Vows to Step Up Fight Against Dalai Lama As Shootings Reported

Ben Blanchard
Reuters
“For the sake of national unity and the development of stability in Tibetan regions, we must take a clear-cut stand and deepen the struggle against the Dalai clique,” the official Xinhua news agency cited Yu Zhengsheng as saying. 

A Wave of Self-Immolations Sweeps Tibet

Jeffrey Bartholet
New Yorker
What is the reason behind the self-immolations of more than 100 Tibetans since 2011–monks and nuns, farmers and nomads, adults and teenagers? Some hope the they gain the world’s attention, and bring pressure on China to rethink its Tibet...

Conversation

07.03.13

How Would Accepting Gay Culture Change China?

Fei Wang & Steven Jiang
Last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down the core provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act is not only “a stride toward greater equality in the United States, but also a shift that will reverberate far beyond our shores,” wrote...

What Will Get Chinese People to Sip Bubbly?

Gwynn Guilford
Quartz
Though China is the world’s fifth-largest wine market, people just don’t go for bubbly that much. Moët Hennessy is trying to alter that trend by opening a new French chateau in poor and predominantly Muslim Ningxia. 

Mixed Signals On China’s Policies in Tibet

Voice of America
Worshipping the Dalai Lama remains illegal in Tibetan areas of China, despite earlier reports of changes in China's policies in Lhasa and in some parts of neighboring Qinghai province.  

China Sex Film Mistakenly Shown on Big Screen in Jilin

BBC
A film banned as pornography in China was accidentally shown on a large LED screen in a public square in Jilin province, Chinese media report. A technician had been watching the film on his computer without realising it was connected to the...

Law Requires Chinese to Visit Their Aging Parents

Louise Watt
Associated Press
It’s still unclear how much the amended law changes the status quo. Elderly parents in China already have been suing their adult children for emotional support, and the new wording does not specify how often people must visit, and other details...

Books

07.02.13

Wealth and Power

Orville Schell and John Delury
Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation—culminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?Wealth and Power answers this question by examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists, and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China. This fascinating survey begins in the lead-up to the first Opium War with Wei Yuan, the nineteenth-century scholar and reformer who was one of the first to urge China to borrow ideas from the West. It concludes in our time with human-rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, an outspoken opponent of single-party rule. Along the way, we meet such titans of Chinese history as the Empress Dowager Cixi, public intellectuals Feng Guifen, Liang Qichao, and Chen Duxiu, Nationalist stalwarts Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhu Rongji.{node, 3592}The common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit of fuqiang, “wealth and power.” This abiding quest for a restoration of national greatness in the face of a “century of humiliation” at the hands of the Great Powers came to define the modern Chinese character. It’s what drove both Mao and Deng to embark on root-and-branch transformations of Chinese society, first by means of Marxism-Leninism, then by authoritarian capitalism. And this determined quest remains the key to understanding many of China’s actions today.By unwrapping the intellectual antecedents of today’s resurgent China, Orville Schell and John Delury supply much-needed insight into the country’s tortured progression from nineteenth-century decline to twenty-first-century boom. By looking backward into the past to understand forces at work for hundreds of years, they help us understand China today and the future that this singular country is helping shape for all of us. —Random House

“We’re Uyghurs. We’re Not Terrorists.” A Plea From Xinjiang

Offbeat China
A plea from a Xinjiang native stirred up discussions of how to make peace with people from different ethnic backgrounds on Weibo. “We’re from Xinjiang. We’re Uyghurs. We’re not terrorists. There are good people and bad people in...

Prison Of The Mind: A Chinese Poet’s Memoir of Incarceration

Ian Buruma
New Yorker
Liao Yiwu, in his extraordinary prison memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs,” describes the case of a schizophrenic woodcutter who had axed his own wife, because she was so emaciated that he took her for a bundle of wood. 

Xi's Call for "Mass Line" Answered by Actions

Xinhua
On June 18, Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, said that the "mass line" is the lifeline of the Party and the CPC's upcoming year-long campaign will be a "thorough cleanup" of undesirable work styles...

Media

06.28.13

A Character Battle Between China’s Government and its Internet Users

The horse is out of the barn. Now that China’s social Web has given every citizen the ability to publish for a wide audience—a privilege once reserved for the government—state publications and Web users there continue to wrangle over who best grasps...

Dalai Lama: No More ‘Wolf in Monk’s Robes’?

Didi Kirsten Tatlow
International Herald Tribune
“In an abrupt and unexpected reversal of policy, Chinese government officials have told monks in some Tibetan areas that they are now free to ‘worship’ the Dalai Lama as a ‘religious leader,’” Tsering Namgyal, a writer and journalist based...

One Child Policy – Is Reform Gaining Momentum?

Scott Greene
China Digital Times
The reorganization of the Population and Family Planning Comission, and its merger with the Ministry of Health as part of a broader restructuring to streamline China's bureauracy, has raised expectations that Xi Jinping’s new government will...

China Lifts 17-year Ban on Dalai Lama Photos at Tibet Monastery

Sui-Lee Wee
Reuters
Chinese officials have lifted a ban on Tibetan monks displaying photographs of the Dalai Lama at a prominent monastery, a rights group said on Thursday, an unexpected policy shift which could ease tensions in the restive region.

Ministry of Truth: Xinjiang Violence

Anne Henochowicz
China Digital Times
27 people are dead after crowds attacked a police station and other government offices yesterday. The police opened fire, killing at least 10. The motive for the riot is still unclear, but ethnic tension is high in the...

Infographics

06.27.13

Are China’s “Losers” Really Winning?

Claire Zhang & David M. Barreda from Sohu
“Diaosi” originated as an insult for a poor, unattractive young person who stayed at home all day playing video games, with dim prospects for the future—a “loser.” Yet as the term went viral on the Internet, Chinese youth from all backgrounds began...

China Must End Silence on Injustice, Warns Film Director Jia Zhangke

Tania Branigan
Guardian
A leading Chinese director has warned the country faces a rising tide of violence unless it tackles its social problems, as he discussed his graphic new film. Jia Zhangke's film, A Touch of Sin has been described as '...

Meet the American Factory Owner Held for Ransom in China

Peter Ford
Christian Science Monitor
Chip Starnes, the American executive who has been held hostage for six days by disgruntled workers at his factory here, finds himself in a predicament that is far from uncommon in China. His employees at Specialty Medical Supplies, fearing...

Chinese Astronauts Land Safely After "Perfect" Space Mission

Reuters
Three Chinese astronauts returned to Earth on Wednesday, touching down in north China's Inner Mongolia after a successful 15-day mission in which they docked with an experimental manned space laboratory.

Study Asks if Tainted Chinese Herbs Are Harming, Not Healing

Sue-Lin Wong
New York Times
Chinese herbal medicine, an ancient tradition that is supposed to heal, may be doing the opposite: is it also harming people’s health and polluting the environment with pesticides, as a Greenpeace study released Monday suggests. The study...

Media

06.25.13

China’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...

Books

06.25.13

Civil Society in China

Karla W. Simon
This is the definitive book on the legal and fiscal framework for civil society organizations (CSOs) in China from earliest times to the present day. Civil Society in China traces the ways in which laws and regulations have shaped civil society over the 5,000 years of China’s history and looks at ways in which social and economic history have affected the legal changes that have occurred over the millennia.This book provides an historical and current analysis of the legal framework for civil society and citizen participation in China, focusing not merely on legal analysis, but also on the ways in which the legal framework influenced and was influenced in turn by social and economic developments. The principal emphasis is on ways in which the Chinese people—as opposed to high-ranking officials or cadres—have been able to play a part in the social and economic development of China through the associations in which they participateCivil Society in China sums up this rather complex journey through Chinese legal, social, and political history by assessing the ways in which social, economic, and legal system reforms in today’s China are bound to have an impact on civil society. The changes that have occurred in China’s civil society since the late 1980’s and, most especially, since the late 1990’s, are nothing short of remarkable. This volume is an essential guide for lawyers and scholars seeking an in depth understanding of social life in China written by one of its leading experts. —Oxford University Press

Prison of the Mind

Ian Buruma
New Yorker
Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, as a “counterrevolutionary” inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about Chinese society, both traditional and Communist. He ends his account by saying that “China remains a prison of the mind:...

Beijing Police Seek ‘Large and Vicious’ Suspects (With Wet Noses)

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
Police in Beijing are enforcing a longstanding ban on dogs taller than 13.7 inches in the districts that make up the heart of the capital. Officials note that rabies last year killed 13 people in Beijing, more than double the number in 2011. Big...

Sinica Podcast

06.22.13

The Evan Osnos Exit Interview

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
In a summer when many reporters and their families are departing Beijing (including many people who have appeared on this podcast), perhaps the biggest loss to the foreign correspondents’ pool in the Chinese capital is the departure of Evan Osnos,...

Books

06.21.13

Why Has China Grown So Fast For So Long?

Khalid Malik
For analysts China presents a conundrum. It is clear that China has made rapid progress, and the landscape of the world is changing due to China’s unique position. Yet for decades, many have questioned this phenomenon, showing concern about cooked data, asset bubbles about to burst, and so on. Yet the Chinese economy has kept growing at a blistering pace, 9-10 per cent annually, and more at times, over a span of almost three decades.Analysing the last 30 years of reforms, this book helps us understand the Chinese growth success, the factors that made this possible, and the lessons that can be distilled from this experience for other developing countries. Arguing that traditional explanations are inadequate, the author applies the “development as transformation” thesis to provide answers to a wide range of questions: Why has China grown so rapidly over such a long time, and what are the country’s prospects in the future? Will it keep growing? Will it in the next few decades actually overtake the US as the largest economy in the world, as some observers have been forecasting, or will it implode as the many contradictions in the economy and society grind it to a halt? This is a unique book in that it is based on years of close interaction with the Chinese leadership, institutions, and society, as well as international organizations in the development community, when the author was posted in China.   —Oxford University Press

Why India Trails China

Amartya Sen
New York Times
India’s underperformance can be traced to a failure to learn from the examples of so-called Asian economic development, in which rapid expansion of human capability is both a goal in itself and an integral element in achieving rapid growth.

The Chimerica Dream

Pepe Escobar
TomDispatch
Whatever the confusions and difficulties the Chinese leadership faces, Beijing seems to understand the realities behind Washington’s strategic intentions. One wonders whether the reverse applies.

On Saving China's Dying Languages

Matt Schiavenza
Atlantic
For a country so thoroughly associated with its national language, referred to in the West as Mandarin, China is remarkably rich in linguistic diversity. Unfortunately, the country's rapid development - and government mandates to use Mandarin...

A Hundred Songs: Exiled Chinese Writer Liao Yiwu’s Rare U.S. Visit

WSJ: China Real Time Report
Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, recently performed at the New York Public Library for his book's U.S. release. His years in prison are the subject of his book “For a Song and a Hundred Songs,” and is a dizzying, and often gruesomely...

Rupert Murdoch's Split: Divorcing Wendi, China Or Both?

Doug Young
Forbes
News Corp’s recent China pullback could be partly linked to Rupert Murdoch’s divorce, with few major new investments likely in the next 2 years.

Culture

06.18.13

The Local Folk

Sun Yunfan
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...

China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities

Ian Johnson
New York Times
The ultimate goal of the government’s modernization plan is to fully integrate 70 percent of the country’s population, or roughly 900 million people, into city living by 2025. Currently, only half that number are.   &...

Calls Grow in China to Press Claim for Okinawa

Jane Perlez
New York Times
The Chinese government has not asserted a claim to Okinawa. But the seminar last month, which included state researchers and retired officers from the senior ranks of the People’s Liberation Army, was the latest act in what seems to be a...

Johnson & Johnson is Treating Chinese Customers Like “Second-Class” Citizens, Say The Chinese Media

Gwynn Guilford
Quartz
While Johnson & Johnson has held 51 global product recalls since 2005, China has been excluded from 48 of them, according to Xinhua. "Any drugs recalled outside China must be recalled in China as well," the China...

Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’ Takes Off in China

Didi Kirsten Tatlow
International Herald Tribune
 “Finnegans Wake” in Chinese may strain the imagination of many, given the almost unsolvable challenges of the original English, but Ms. Dai Congrong, an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Fudan University,...

Conversation

06.13.13

Who’d You Rather Be Watched By: China or the U.S.?

Tai Ming Cheung, Andrew J. Nathan & more
Reports of U.S. gathering data on emails and phone calls have stoked fears of an over-reaching government spying on its citizens. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei worries that China will use the U.S. as an example to bolster its argument for surveillance on...

Few Chinese Follow NSA Revelations but Embrace Leaker

Calum MacLeod
USA Today
Although Snowden is believed to be holed up in Hong Kong, the southern city that since 1997 forms part of the People's Republic but retains some autonomy, China's state-run media has offered little coverage to date, and it's also not...

A Hero’s Welcome for Snowden on Chinese Internet

Wall Street Journal
Chinese Internet users – who for years have lived with well-founded paranoia over the possibility that someone the government could be monitoring their activities online — lauded the self-described whistleblower for the risks he has taken in...

Online Furor as Prosecutors Recommend ‘Leniency’ for Chinese Rail Boss

Liz Carter
Over the past 24 hours, the most viral post on Sina Weibo, has been a revelation that prosecutors advised that Liu Zhijun be given a “lenient sentence,” despite his admitted accumulation of 374 houses and over US$100...

Soul-Searching Former Red Guard Won Praises on Weibo

Jing Gao
Ministry of Tofu
Liu Boqin’s public apology for his acts during the Cultural Revolution received widespread accolates from Chinese netizens. On Sina Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, an overwhelming majority of commentors applauded him while saying, other Red Guards...

China’s Venetian Quandary: Chinese Artists

Kevin Holden Platt
New York Times
The Chinese exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale, which opened June 1 and runs through Nov. 24, has been organized by Wang Chunchen, head of curatorial research at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Beijing. Its theme, “...

Media

06.12.13

In 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...