Media
02.12.13Joke About Gay Romance on Chinese New Year Gala Lights Up Blogosphere
Is “bromance” in the air? Not according to state-run China Central Television (CCTV).{vertical_photo_right}Thousands of fans yelled “Get together” in unison when piano prodigy Li Yundi made a guest appearance at Chinese-American pop sensation Leehom...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.11.13In China, A Vast Chasm Between the Rich and the Rest
New York Times
The passing coal miners in remote Shaanxi Province took one look at our marooned Audi and walked on, leaving us stuck on the sleet-covered mountain road. As dusk fell, I managed to mingle with some young migrant workers, and trek with them through a...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.11.13Province By Province, A Portrait of China
New York Times
A Swiss couple thought it would be a good project to photograph all of China's provinces. They got a great portrait series, and then some.
Viewpoint
02.11.13A Beginning for China’s Battered Women
Like it or not, it takes an American woman to give a face, bring a voice, and deliver a victory to battered women in China. On February 3, a milestone court decision in Beijing granted a divorce to Kim Lee, a victim of domestic abuse, from her...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.11.13Staying Safe During Spring Festival: A Teacher’s Advice to his Students
Rectified.name
An actual email from one foreign teacher to his Chinese students—he thought it also might be useful to any first time Spring Festival-ers out there.
The NYRB China Archive
02.09.13Blogging the Slow-Motion Revolution
from New York Review of Books
Huang Qi is best known in China as the creator of the country’s first human rights website, Liusi Tianwang, or “June 4 Heavenly Web.” A collection of reports and photos, as well as the occasional first-person account of abuse, the site is updated...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.08.13Snakes On a Lane
Global Times
Beneath the creepy exterior lies a misunderstood goddess. What pops up in your mind when it comes to the concept of snake? Cold-blooded, dangerous, sly, or even a symbol of evil? It seems that all words related to it are negative. And even though we...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.08.13Vipers and Beasts in the Year of the Little Dragon
China Story
A certain wariness surrounds the Snake, one of the twelve zoological signs of the traditional Chinese calendar, and not only because the reptile inspires fear and repulsion.
Sinica Podcast
02.08.13Revenge of the Call-in Show
from Sinica Podcast
Curious what happened to Sinica last week? Well ... as it turns out, our call-in show from two weeks ago wasn’t exactly pleased with how quickly we managed to replace it, and took out its anger on the laptop we use to record new shows, smashing the...
Media
02.07.13Chinese Beverage Maker Turns Legal Setback Into Viral Ad Campaign
This is no tempest in an herbal tea pot. The JDB Group, maker of China’s most popular herbal tea—one that raked in approximately 20 billion RMB (USD $3.2 billion) in revenues in 2012—lost another legal battle in its epic trademark war with the state...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.01.13Defining the Chinese Dream (Editorial)
Amid growing rivalry with the U.S., Beijing’s diplomats must clearly explain their country’s values to ease the concerns of neighbors.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.31.13From Alberta to China, With Nine Kids in Tow
Calgary Herald
Cory and Michelle Coles, both 36, and nine of their 10 children are flying off to China for nine months with the hope of learning Mandarin and understanding more about the fascinating culture behind the emerging superpower.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.31.13China’s Ethnic Manchus Rediscovering Their Roots
Los Angeles Times
Aristocracy is no longer a dirty word in China, and those with ties to the nation's last imperial rulers are now embracing their past.
Media
01.30.13Chinese Web Erupts With Widespread Calls for Change as Beijing Endures Airpocalypse 2.0
Beijingers are choking on their air—again. Just seventeen days after Chinese cyberspace erupted with complaints about air so bad that it was “beyond index,” denizens of the Chinese capital awoke once again to a city blanketed with smog. Over the...
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01.30.13Opinion: Re-education Revisited
New York Times
How much of a reformer is China’s new leader, Xi Jinping? The January announcement that China is going to stop “Re-education Through Labor” by the end of the year could offer an important clue.
Caixin Media
01.26.13Garden of Lost Children
It started with a baby that was left in the doorway of a hospital bathroom. Yuan Lihai took in the girl with a cleft lip while working at a Henan province hospital in 1989. At the department of gynecology and obstetrics, she was paid 20 yuan for...
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01.26.13Eastern Promise in LIttle Africa
Globe and Mail
Chasing their slice of China’s raging appetite, tens of thousands of African traders are settling uneasily in the ghettos of Guangzhou.
Media
01.25.13Former China State TV Director Bemoans Anti-Japanese Propaganda: “Where’s the Creativity?”
Are Chinese audiences growing weary of anti-Japanese propaganda? It would seem that some, at least, are growing sick of the pathetic villains, superhuman heroes, and lame endings that many Chinese movies and television series about World War II, or...
Sinica Podcast
01.25.13The Call-in Show
from Sinica Podcast
So our show this week isn’t technically a call-in show, given the lack of phones in our studio, but it is as close as we can get it, so thanks to everyone who sent us a pre-recorded question. We had a lot more responses than we expected, and the...
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01.20.13China’s Inequality Index Highlights Urgency for Distribution Reforms
Global Times
The first rich-poor index for the past decade paints a far-from-rosy picture of what must be done to bridge the wealth gap.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.19.13Opinion: Will China End the One-Child Rule?
New York Times
Historically, China's supplied workers to the world. But as it ages the country might seek to recruit immigrants as labor.
Media
01.16.13Their Horizons Widening, China’s Web Users Look Abroad — And Want More
Last week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to embrace the Internet. Only a small proportion of that country’s 24 million people can access the World Wide Web, and the majority of the 1.5 million mobile phones there...
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01.16.13Analysis: New China Leaders Must
Reuters
Xiang Songzuo, the Agricultural Bank of China's chief economist says “stabilizing growth is a pre-condition for delivering on reform.”
Viewpoint
01.13.13Is Xi Jinping a Reformer? It’s Much Too Early to Tell
Last weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the pages of The New York Times that he feels moderately confident China will experience resurgent economic reform and probably political reform as well under the leadership of recently installed Communist...
Caixin Media
01.13.13Police to Stop Camps This Year, Politburo Member Says
The notorious system that lets police send detainees to labor camps without trial will be halted this year, said Meng Jianzhu, secretary of the Central Politics and Law Commission, at a conference on January 7.Meng said the Communist Party’s Central...
Caixin Media
01.13.13Shutter Labor Camp System for Good, Legal Experts Urge
Legal experts have called on the government to follow through with hints at abolishing the country’s notorious system of labor camps.On January 7, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu said at a top conference that the system would “cease to be used.” His...
ChinaFile Recommends
01.11.13China's Twitter Goes Hollywood
Daily Beast
A weibo message from Brad Pitt set off a buzz this week, and he’s not the only overseas star invading the microblog.
Infographics
01.10.13What Does China Think?
Are Chinese citizens happy with the direction their country is taking? Do they believe in a market economy? Do they believe that hard work brings success?
Each year, the American think tank Pew Research Center asks questions like these to...
Media
01.09.13Why is a Mediocre, Low-Budget Comedy Taking China’s Box Office by Storm?
December 2012 saw hot competition in Chinese cinema. It began with Life of Pi, which was directed by Ang Li, an Oscar-winning director, followed by 1942, a historical movie by director Feng Xiaogang, and The Last Supper, by up-and-coming director Lu...
Media
01.08.13Online and Off, Social Media Users Go to War for Freedom of Press in China
When Mr. Tuo Zhen, the propaganda chief of Guangdong province, rewrote and replaced the New Year’s editorial of the Southern Weekend newspaper without the consent of its editors, he probably did not think it would make much of a splash. Indeed, Mr...
Media
01.07.13“Help Me Pay This Bill”: A Short But Incisive Send-Up of Chinese Corruption
It is a social media classic, a send-up of the corruption and profligacy that so often enrage Web users in China. A very short story variously titled “I Did Not Eat For Free” and “Help Me Pay This Bill” has been making the rounds for months on Sina...
Caixin Media
01.04.13Twisted Tongues
China’s cultural progress in the year 2012 can be summed up with eight words: weibo (microblog), diaosi (commoners), yuanfangti (a Yuanfang-like inquiry), shejian (tip of the tongue), yangsheng (keeping fit), shisanchai (thirteen hairpins, from a...
Media
01.03.13How a Run-Down Government Building Became the Hottest Item on China’s Social Web
It is perhaps a sign of the times in China that an image of nothing more than a ramshackle county government building could echo so widely. Since its posting on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter, hours before New Year’s Eve, the image (see below) has been...
Environment
01.02.13China’s New “Middle Class” Environmental Protests
from chinadialogue
China’s urban residents (or the new “middle class”) protest on the streets only very rarely. Discontent is expressed almost exclusively online, via angry typing. But this has changed over the last five years—protests have come offline and on to the...
My First Trip
12.31.12After Ping Pong, Before Kissinger
My first trip to China apparently began in Montreal.It was April 1971, and the American ping-pong team had just been invited to China, opening the public part of the complex diplomacy that eventually brought Richard Nixon to Beijing and direct...
Caixin Media
12.28.12Desperate Cash Infusions Driving Blood Trade
The tumor was growing, and the family of cancer patient Xia Jianqing was growing desperate.Doctors at a military hospital in Beijing had warned Xia’s family that he would die without the blood needed for a lifesaving operation. But the hospital had...
Caixin Media
12.28.12Uncertain Future for Architectural Treasures
Nestled between mountains and a winding river in a scenic corner of Shanxi province is Zhongyang County, the home of an exquisite Confucian temple built during the Ming dynasty.The colorful wooden temple graced this idyllic valley for hundreds of...
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12.26.12Buy, Sell, Adopt: Child Trafficking in China
New York Times
In the past two and a half years, according to government statistics, some 54,000 children have been rescued from traffickers.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.26.12China's Anti-Corruption Tool Kit: No Flowers, Expensive Booze or 'Empty Talk'
Time
China's new leadership has made combating the country’s endemic corruption one of its publicly stated missions.
Media
12.24.12The Most Popular Chinese Web Searches of 2012
What did China search for in 2012? It wasn’t the hotly disputed Diaoyu Islands or the widely-watched London Olympics.On Baidu.com, China’s homegrown search engine commanding about eighty-three percent of the Chinese search market, the most popular...
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12.21.12Food For Thought
Economist
Food companies play an ambivalent part in the fight against flab. China's packaged food sales are 3-4 times their 2002 level.
The NYRB China Archive
12.21.12Beijing’s Doomsday Problem
from New York Review of Books
Over the past ten days, China has been riveted by accounts of what authorities say are its very own doomsday cult: the church of Almighty God, which has prophesized that the world will end today. Authorities have said the group staged illegal...
The NYRB China Archive
12.20.12The New Chinese Gang of Seven
from New York Review of Books
In traditional Chinese religion, a fashi, or ritual master, will recite a set of phrases to turn an ordinary space into a sacred area where the gods can descend to receive prayers and rejuvenate the community. The ceremony can last days, with breaks...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.19.12The Top 10 Chinese Internet Memes of 2012
Wall Street Journal
2012 saw social media supercharg one of contemporary China’s finest forms of cultural and political expression: the Internet meme.
Infographics
12.19.12A Comparison of China’s and America’s Richest People
CNPolitics, a Chinese-language news website, recently released this infographic examining the differences between China and America’s wealthiest individuals as reported by Forbes Magazine. As the site notes, China’s relatively recent economic rise...
Features
12.18.12College Graduates Compete for Jobs Sweeping Streets
from Tablet
Tong Peng spent six months discovering his bachelor’s degree was “worthless” before deciding to apply for a job as a street sweeper.He graduated from college in Harbin in June, 2012, not expecting to find it so tough to find work with a college...
Books
12.17.12Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged
Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged examines the twenty-year aftermath of the 1989 assaults on established, state-sponsored socialism in the former Soviet bloc and in China. Editors Nina Bandelj and Dorothy J. Solinger bring together prominent experts on Eastern Europe and China to examine the respective trajectories of political, economic, and social transformations that unfolded in these two areas, while also comparing the changes that ensued within the two regions. The volume features paired comparisons, with one chapter on the countries from the former Soviet bloc and one on China for each of the following themes: the reinstitutionalization of politics, the recasting of state-society relations, the reform of economic systems, changes in economic behavior, and transformations of social institutions. Despite differences in the specific substantive focus and disciplinary grounding among individual chapters, all chapters share a concern with the fate of the state in postsocialism. They elaborate on topics such as the transformations of the old socialist state and its nature, activities and roles; civil society before and after 1989; the ways in which the state has, or has not, acted to encourage new forms of economic behavior; and the state's responsibility for societal trends, whether in family formation, in protest or in inequality. Taking a unique approach to understand twentieth-century socialism on a global scale, Socialism Vanquished, Socialism Challenged uncovers insights about political models and economic patterns that have emerged in the grand project of the transition from socialism. —Oxford University Press
Media
12.17.12Media Effort to Emphasize Newtown Tragedy Backfires in Blogosphere
Tragedy can strike anywhere. Mere hours before the horrific shooting at an American school in Newtown, Connecticut that left twenty-eight people dead, including twenty children, a horrific school attack also happened in China. At an elementary...
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12.16.12China Watches Newtown: Guns and American Credibility
New Yorker
Authoritarian states ward off calls for political freedoms arguing that U.S.-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy.
Caixin Media
12.16.12Mobile Phones Souring Africa’s Image of China
Every day, about a dozen mobile phone wholesalers field orders and manufacturer offers from offices inside a nondescript, five-story building on Luthuli Avenue in downtown Nairobi.The building doesn’t look like a hub for global commerce, nor does it...
Sinica Podcast
12.14.12China 3.0
from Sinica Podcast
Today on Sinica, join us for a discussion on economics, politics, and geopolitics with Mark Leonard from the European Council on Foreign Relations. Our specific focus is China 3.0, the council’s recent compendium of essays on contemporary Chinese...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.13.12Rectification of Names, 鸿海 Division
Atlantic
Now you might be thinking: Oh, no! Another Chinese company whose name I have to remember and that I have to care about. Calm down. As people who operate in China know, and as one "by the way" clause in the story points out, Hon Hai...
Media
12.12.12The “Chinese Dream” Means One Thing to its Leaders, and Another to its People
Since China unveiled the new Politburo Standing Committee at the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the country’s Web users have been paying close attention to the new elite group of leaders who will set the country’s agenda for...
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12.12.12In the People’s Liberation Army
New York Review of Books
Mo Yan, recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, describes an experience in the People's Liberation Army in the 1970s. This text is excerpted from his part fiction, part memoir Change.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.12.12China Reportedly Strips Shanghai Bishop of His Title
New York Times
A Roman Catholic bishop who stunned congregants and Communist Party officials last July when he renounced his government position during his consecration has been stripped of his religious title, according to two Catholic Web sites that cited...
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12.12.12The “Just Sisters” Defense: China’s Sex-Scandal Surge
New Yorker
Faced with a sex scandal of breathtaking tackiness, a Chinese police district could be forgiven for feeling perhaps a flicker of relief last week when someone in the office stumbled on what must have felt like good news under the circumstances—a...
Culture
12.11.12Sheng Keyi on Mo Yan: “Literature Supersedes Politics and Everything Else”
In a recent conversation at the Asia Society, novelist Sheng Keyi said she felt the critism of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize was unjustified. The controversy, she said, arises from Mo Yan’s politics rather than his literature, “and I think to critique him on...
Culture
12.11.12Yu Jie: Awarding Mo Yan the Nobel Prize Was a “Huge Mistake”
Mo Yan accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm on December 10.The 57-year-old novelist often writes stories based on memories of his village childhood, and his work and his political views have triggered wide debate. In...
Out of School
12.11.12What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong
When Chinese novelist Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this week, the relationship between literature and politics attracted much attention. The award is often given to writers who forcefully oppose political repression. When...
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12.10.12Keep Smiling! – You’re Being Watched
China Story
Frequent media reports of overwhelming popular support for mass surveillance are propagandistic in tone and content. However, is there nonetheless some truth in the ‘happy Chinese panopticon’? An international comparative survey on privacy and...