‘What Happened, Mama? In 1989, Were You Just Like Me?’

An’an

Two things motivated me to come to the U.S. for college in 2021. I believed in the fourth estate and wanted to become an investigative journalist, and I knew China had no space for speaking truth to power. I also wanted to run away from my family, especially my mother. And yet, in the fall of 2023, I found myself returning to China on a gap year. Read full story>>

Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

Part I

Zha Jianying

Every morning, I crossed a stretch of railway tracks on the way to my school. The tracks lay less than a hundred meters from the school gate, and a train often appeared in the late afternoon just as we were discharged. Sometimes it was a freight train piled high with lumber or coal. It would be gliding along, clink clank, clink clank, at low speed because it was getting near its destination. Not far beyond the road bend was a timber mill and a coal plant, where logs and the coal would be... Read full story>>

‘A Nation Was Forged by Literary Writers’

An Excerpt from Granta 169: CHINA

Thomas Meaney via Granta

This year, I returned to a Beijing I hardly recognized. It was not the capital I first glimpsed as a child in the 1980s, when groups of men in thin jackets stood smoking in the cold, and tides of cyclists seemed ready to carry me away. Nor was it the city of the 1990s, when the muzak of Kenny G poured out of the loudspeakers of Tiananmen Square, or the Beijing of Hu Jintao, when frat boys drank themselves into oblivion under the green skies of Sanlitun, while in hotel ballrooms Western... Read full story>>

Xi vs. Xu: Two Visions for China’s Future

Teng Biao & Jerome A. Cohen

In late October, Radio Free Asia reported that Chinese civil rights advocate and lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who is serving a 14-year sentence for state subversion, has been hunger striking to protest the conditions of his incarceration. Xu’s imprisonment stems from his vision for China’s future. At a moment when his situation seems particularly dire, it’s worth tracing how his story intersects with and diverges from that of Xi Jinping, the man whose vision for China is responsible for Xu’s captivity. Read full story>>

ChinaFile Presents: ‘Nikah,’ a Film Screening and Discussion

Mukaddas Mijit, Bastien Ehouzan & more

The film ‘Nikah,’ set in China’s Uyghur region in 2017, spans the months between two weddings. It follows Dilber, a young woman approaching a crossroads amid the Chinese government’s surveilling and detaining of members of her community. As even her most personal decisions become suddenly political, Dilber must struggle with the tension between tradition and modernity, as her world closes in around her. Co-directors Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan were in conversation with ChinaFile Senior... Read full story>>

How Much Will New Stimulus Improve China’s Economic Outlook?

A ChinaFile Conversation

Arthur R. Kroeber, Michael Pettis & more via ChinaFile Conversation

After months of downbeat economic news and little action from the Chinese government, Beijing has announced a slew of stimulus measures. Are the stimulus measures enough to make a difference and are they going to work as long as secular trends like demographics and global uncertainty don’t change? What signal should we look for to understand if the stimulus measures will work? How will China’s economy perform in the next year? Read full story>>

China’s Iconoclast

Ian Johnson via New York Review of Books

I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo by Perry Link, the leading Western chronicler of dissent in China, and a Chinese colleague who writes anonymously as Wu Dazhi is the definitive biography of the most famous dissident in the nearly seventy-five-year history of the People’s Republic of China. The book, long and necessarily ambitious, is also a tour de force survey of Chinese political thought, activism, and dissent over the past half-century. Read full story>>