• Phillip Faraone—Getty Images for TikTok

    Tick Tock for TikTok

    A ChinaFile Conversation

    Kevin Xu, Ivy Yang & more via ChinaFile Conversation

    Will TikTok succeed in defending itself on First Amendment grounds, or will it be forced to shut down in the U.S.? Or will ByteDance find a creative way out of the problem? What will this case mean for Chinese business interests in the U.S. and the future of tech? And given that Donald Trump appears to have reversed his earlier position on banning TikTok while Joe Biden signed the ban, what effect might the TikTok ban have on the U.S. election? Read full story>>

  • Yasuyoshi Chiba—AFP/Getty Images

    Is China’s Cultural Outreach to Muslims in Indonesia Working?

    Randy Mulyanto

    Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. So as Beijing ramps up its engagement with the Global South and with the Muslim world, it is unsurprising that it has been reaching out to various Muslim organizations and strengthening its people-to-people exchanges with the Muslim community in Indonesia. Read full story>>

  • Rizwan Tabassum—AFP/Getty Images

    Can China’s Scholarships and Cultural Diplomacy Efforts Succeed in Pakistan?

    Akbar Notezai

    In Washington, D.C., China has a bad reputation for the way it treats its Muslim minorities. But views differ greatly in many majority-Muslim countries in Asia. Educational programs and exchanges are a key part of this. Pakistan is an exemplar: Estimates suggest that more than 28,000 students studied in China in 2019, making it the top destination for outward-bound students. Read full story>>

  • Pak Yiu—AFP/Getty Images

    How a Crackdown Transformed LGBTQ Activism in China

    With high-profile campaigns and organizing no longer possible, China’s LGBTQ advocates look to subtler channels for change

    Darius Longarino

    In 2020, events took a turn. Soon after wrapping up Pride Month festivities, Shanghai Pride announced it was ending its 12-year run. Organizers soon revealed the reason for the closure was that they no longer felt safe under intensifying harassment and threats from authorities. For many in China’s LGBTQ community, the news was gut-wrenching not only for the sheer sense of loss, but also because the takedown of the flagship celebration—which had once won plaudits from the Global Times and China... Read full story>>

  • Xiao Lu Chu—Getty Images

    From Wild Exuberance to State Control in China’s Art Market

    A Q&A with Kejia Wu

    Jeremy Goldkorn & Kejia Wu

    The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a fascinating book that examines the relationship between the Chinese government’s push for cultural “soft power” and its desire for control. In the book, Wu looks at the rise of contemporary art and a market for it after the end of the Cultural Revolution; the oddity of China’s parallel art systems: one highly ideological, censored, and state-organized market, and the other market-oriented; and five... Read full story>>

  • Sjoberg/Scanpix—AFP/Getty Images

    Southeast Asia Doesn’t Want to Choose between China and the U.S.

    The U.S. Wants China’s Neighbors to Take Sides. But Based on America’s Record, Why Would They?

    Bryanna Entwistle

    If history provides a guide to the future, upholding human rights will continue to be sidelined in the U.S.’ Southeast Asia policy, and priority will be given to relationships and policies that benefit the U.S. as it seeks to build leverage over China. Given the history of America’s involvement in the region—especially in the case of Cambodia—Southeast Asians are understandably skeptical of American promises to champion human rights and protect their interests. Read full story>>

Recent Stories

Conversation

08.19.24

What to Make of China’s Moves in the Middle East

Carice Witte, Joyce Karam & more
What does Beijing expect to gain from the intra-Palestinian peace talks? What considerations shape China’s position on the Israel-Gaza conflict, and on the wider geopolitical picture of the Middle East? How does China’s support for Iran factor into...

Viewpoint

07.23.24

Sideline Sinology

Peter Hessler
In August, when I visited Wuhan, I met with a young building-company manager who had worked on the construction sites of various emergency clinics and quarantine facilities during the city’s outbreak. “The pandemic is like a mirror,” the manager...

Conversation

08.06.24

How Safe Is China’s Food in Light of the Fuel-Tanker Cooking-Oil Scandal?

Isabel Hilton, Yaling Jiang & more
Melamine-tainted milk, rat meat sold as lamb, recycled cooking oil sourced from restaurant waste or even sewers, rice containing poisonous heavy metals: food safety scandals were extraordinarily frequent in China in the first 15 years of the 21st...

Features

06.10.24

The Committee that Ended the Age of Engagement?

Charles Hutzler
The U.S. Congress’ special China committee has a packed agenda for the few months left this term. But its most consequential work may be done: a more confrontational U.S. policy towards China. The Select Committee on the Strategic Competition...

Media

07.23.24

ChinaFile Presents: Peter Hessler’s ‘Other Rivers: A Chinese Education’

Peter Hessler & Vincent Ni
On July 17, ChinaFile hosted the launch of Peter Hessler’s Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, a memoir of his two years teaching at Sichuan University in Chengdu from 2019 to 2021. The book explores elementary and college education, China’s handling...

Features

06.17.24

“The Police’s Strength Is Limited, but the People’s Strength Is Boundless”

Jessica Batke
In some ways, “vigilantes” are the opposite of what their name suggests: rather than rogue agents meting out street justice, they are individuals deemed trustworthy by authorities, working under the guidance of local police forces, deputized to...

Viewpoint

05.13.24

Beijing’s Culinary Crusade: Erasing Uyghur Identity through Food

Timothy Grose
Instruction began early on a November 2018 morning. This lesson was not taught in a classroom, but in a makeshift kitchen as part of Xinjiang’s “household school” program. There, a teacher stood before her class of adult women and asked: “What do...

Features

03.08.24

Xinjiang Authorities Are Retroactively Applying Laws to Prosecute Religious Leaders as Criminals

Darren Byler from Foreign Policy
Sholpan Amirkhan and her aunt gasped when the guards carried her brother-in-law Nurlan Pioner into the Jimunai County People’s Court, on the border with Kazakhstan in China’s western region of Xinjiang. He was gaunt, and a fetid smell followed him...

Media

11.01.23

ChinaFile Presents: China Reporting in Exile

Annie Jieping Zhang, Li Yuan & more
ChinaFile and The New York Review of Books co-hosted a panel discussion with Chinese journalists working from abroad. Participants included reporter, editor, and digital media entrepreneur Annie Jieping Zhang, New York Times columnist Li Yuan,...

Explore the Site

The New York Review of Books China Archive

from New York Review of Books
Welcome to the New York Review of Books China Archive, a collaborative project of ChinaFile.org and The New York Review of Books. In the archive you will find a compilation of full-length essays and book reviews on China dating from the Review'...

Photography & Video

Photo Gallery

07.24.19

‘I Love HK but Hate It at the Same Time’

Todd R. Darling
A central issue many of the Hong Kong people in my portraits are wrestling with is how to define an identity and being challenged in that pursuit by cultural, social, or political pressures. There is a lot of frustration and anger over the recent...

Books

Books

03.12.20

China and Intervention at the UN Security Council

Courtney J. Fung
Oxford University Press: What explains China’s response to intervention at the UN Security Council? China and Intervention at the UN Security Council argues that status is an overlooked determinant in understanding its decisions, even in the apex cases that are shadowed by a public discourse calling for foreign-imposed regime change in Sudan, Libya, and Syria. It posits that China reconciles its status dilemma as it weighs decisions to intervene, seeking recognition from both its intervention peer groups of great powers and developing states. Understanding the impact and scope of conditions of status answers why China has taken certain positions regarding intervention and how these positions were justified. Foreign policy behavior that complies with status, and related social factors like self-image and identity, means that China can select policy options bearing material costs. China and Intervention at the UN Security Council draws on an extensive collection of data, including over two hundred interviews with UN officials and Chinese foreign policy elites, participant observation at UN Headquarters, and a dataset of Chinese-language analysis regarding foreign-imposed regime change and intervention. The book concludes with new perspectives on the malleability of China’s core interests, insights about the application of status for cooperation, and the implications of the status dilemma for rising powers.{chop}

Books

03.24.20

Vernacular Industrialism in China

Eugenia Lean
Columbia University Press: In early 20th-century China, Chen Diexian (1879-1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters, captain of industry, magazine editor, and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early 20th-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the 21st century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.{chop}

Notes from ChinaFile

From Wild Exuberance to State Control in China’s Art Market

Jeremy Goldkorn & Kejia Wu
The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a fascinating book that examines the relationship between the Chinese government’s push for cultural “soft power” and its desire for control. In the book,...

35 Years Later: A Retrospective of Our Work on the 1989 Tiananmen Protests and Crackdown

This year is the 35th anniversary of the 1989 mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and elsewhere around China, and their brutal suppression on June 4. The memories of these events are receding into the past, a process greatly aided in...