When You Grow Up
PETER HESSLERLittle Lu, Little Zhang, and Little Liu waited for me at the end of the bridge. They were ten, twelve, and fourteen years old, respectively, and they had come from the same village in northern Sichuan Province. They said that they had dropped out of school and migrated to the...
Original Copies
BIANCA BOSKERA 108-meter high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square in Hangzhou. A Chengdu residential complex for 200,000 recreates Dorchester, England. An ersatz Queen’s Guard patrols Shanghai’s Thames Town, where pubs and statues of Winston Churchill abound. Gleaming replicas...
Living Underground
ANA FUENTESThey are called rats, and they have become a symbol of Beijing’s red-hot real estate market. Because of soaring housing costs, there are at least a million people living underground, only able to afford a rented room in the basements of skyscrapers or converted bomb shelters in...
From the Dragon’s Mouth
ANA FUENTESFrom The Dragon’s Mouth: Ten True Stories that Unveil the Real China is an exquisitely intimate look into the China of the 21st century as seen through the eyes of its people. This is one of the rare times a book combines the voices of everyday Chinese people from so many...
China Concerto
JONATHAN LANDRETHBefore February 2012, when his name exploded onto the front pages of newspapers around the globe, most people outside of China had never heard of Bo Xilai, the now-fallen Communist Party Secretary of the megacity of Chongqing. But in the years leading up to the murder trial that...
Poor Accommodations
HAI ZHANGDecades of unprecedented economic growth have affected the lives of more than a generation of mainland Chinese and reshaped the urban structure of cities. China has become one of the most exciting and permissive places in the world to practice architecture.From 2009 to early 2010...
Pressures and Distortions
EDITED BY NED KAUFMANPressures and Distortions looks at the design, building, and interpretation of cities from the point of view of their residents.The cities chronicled in depth include examples from China (Shanghai and Shenzhen), Latin America (Bogotá and Mexico City), and Indonesia (Banda Aceh...
The Men Are Louder: A Gender Analysis of Weibo
TEA LEAF NATIONDoes Sina Weibo provide an equal platform for expression for both men and women in China? According to a recent study conducted by Sun Huan, a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies and a research assistant at the Center for Civic Media at MIT, the answer is probably no....
For Many in China, the One Child Policy is Already...
LESLIE T. CHANGBefore getting pregnant with her second child, Lu Qingmin went to the family-planning office to apply for a birth permit. Officials in her husband’s Hunan village where she was living turned her down, but she had the baby anyway. She may eventually be fined $1,600—about what...
China’s Post 1980’s Generation—Are the Kids All...
SUN YUNFAN, ORVILLE SCHELL, DAMIEN MAThis week, the ChinaFile Conversation is a call for reactions to an article about China's current generation gap, written by James Palmer, a Beijing-based historian, author, and Global Times editor. The article, first published by Aeon in the U.K., “The Balinghou: Chinese...
Will China’s Property Market Crash, and So What If It...
DORINDA ELLIOTT, BILL BISHOPDorinda Elliott:At this week’s National People’s Congress, outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao proclaimed that the government kept housing prices from rising too fast. Really? I wonder what my 28-year-old Shanghainese friend Robert thinks about that. He and his fiancée could never...
Air Quality in China: A Snapshot
TEA LEAF NATIONNearly five weeks ago, Beijing experienced its worst day of air quality on record: Levels of PM2.5—small particulates that can cause lung, cardiovascular, and respiratory disease—soared to more than thirty times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization.View...