Wang Jixian: A Voice from The Other China, but in Odessa

Geremie R. Barmé

“Hello, everyone. This is Jixian in Odessa. Just checking in to let you know that I’m okay; I’m still alive.” This is the way that Wang Jixian, a 37-year-old software engineer originally from Beijing, starts most of his daily vlog updates posted from Odessa, the third-largest city in Ukraine and a famous seaport located on the Black Sea. Wang started uploading short videos as the army of the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. Read full story>>

China’s Calculus on the Invasion of Ukraine

A ChinaFile Conversation

Paul Haenle, Bonnie S. Glaser & more via ChinaFile Conversation

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the response from much of the international community has been swift and coordinated, with sanctions, shipments of armaments, and loud condemnation. China, however, has stayed markedly apart. What does Russia’s invasion of Ukraine mean for China? Where are the places to look for a clearer picture of how China’s position on the war is likely to evolve? Read full story>>

Remembering Jonathan Spence

A ChinaFile Conversation

Pamela Kyle Crossley, Sherman Cochran & more via ChinaFile Conversation

A few weeks after Jonathan Spence, the celebrated historian of China, died at Christmas, ChinaFile began collecting reminiscences from his classmates, doctoral students, and colleagues spanning the five decades of his extraordinary career as a scholar, teacher, and author. Read full story>>

In Xinjiang’s Tech Incubators, Innovation Is Inseparable from Repression

Jessica Batke

Innovation and its benefits to society in Xinjiang have come to encompass both the use of big data to enhance cross-border trade and the use of big data to monitor people inside their own homes. Official documents promoting innovation in Xinjiang make no distinction between tools to help facilitate ethnic and religious repression and those designed to advance good governance. The broad use of the term “innovation” to embrace such seemingly incompatible intentions also reveals why they are not... Read full story>>

When Paul Robeson Sang for China

An Excerpt from ‘Arise, Africa! Roar, China!: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century’

Gao Yunxiang

In November 1940, Paul Robeson received a phone call, perhaps from the noted Chinese writer Lin Yutang, asking him to meet a recent arrival from China: Liu Liangmo. Within half an hour, Robeson was in the caller’s apartment. Liu recalled Robeson “beaming over me with his friendly smile and his giant hands firmly holding mine.” They became fast friends. When Robeson inquired about the mass singing movement that Liu had initiated in China, Liu related the backstory behind the new genre of Chinese... Read full story>>

Keeping the Flies Out

Anne Stevenson-Yang via Mekong Review

The first time I rode a public bus in China, in 1985, a young woman came up to me and ran her hand up and down my arm to feel the body hair. Foreigners were like rare animals then: precious, strange, probably dangerous. Surveillance was constant and labor-intensive. At the Beijing Friendship Hotel, there were staff assigned to go through the trash, read any diaries or letters left in the apartment while the resident was out, check mail, and listen to phone calls. A Canadian friend who switched... Read full story>>

A Vast Network of ‘New Era Civilization Practice Centers’ Is Beijing’s Latest Bid to Reclaim Hearts and Minds

Jessica Batke

New Era Civilization Practice Centers are designed to deliver a mix of social services and political indoctrination, to draw China’s citizens ever nearer to the Party by giving them tangible reminders of the Party’s largesse and molding them into the type of citizens the Party would like them to be. Though these centers have received little attention outside of China, ChinaFile has traced their emergence as a new feature of the country’s political topography through Party directives,... Read full story>>

Verdicts from China’s Courts Used to Be Accessible Online. Now They’re Disappearing.

Luo Jiajun & Thomas Kellogg

Judicial transparency in China has taken a significant step backward in recent months. Beginning at least a year ago, China’s Supreme People’s Court has considerably scaled back the number of cases available on its China Judgments Online web portal, an Internet platform that is the leading database for judicial decisions from courts across the country. According to one recent media report, court officials removed at least 11 million cases from the site over a three-month period in early 2021,... Read full story>>