Artists, essayists, lawyers, bloggers and others deemed to be online troublemakers have been hauled into police stations and investigated or imprisoned for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge that was once confined to physical activities like handing out fliers or organizing protests.
The social and economic impacts are well documented: the world’s most rapidly ageing population, a growing labour shortage, a heavy and unfunded pension burden, an unknown number of undocumented “illegal” children and a gender imbalance of at least 35 million missing women, are the result of selective abortion and infanticide by a population that relied on male children for support in old age and to fulfil the obligation of continuing the line.
Originally from Ohio, Carl Setzer and his wife, Fang Liu, have owned and operated the Great Leap Brewing, a micro beer brewery in Beijing, since 2010.
Great Leap Brewing is an institution. As one of the earliest American-style microbreweries in China, not only has the company rescued us from endless nights of Snow and Yanjing, but it has also given us something uniquely Chinese with its assortment of peppercorn, honey, and tea-flavored beers. So as much as we love the other microbreweries in Beijing and throw our money at them too, it’s no accident the Great Leap taproom is our most frequent destination most evenings after recording a show.
Tom Gold is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His research has covered issues of private business, youth, guanxi, popular culture, and civil society in China, as well as social and political change in Taiwan.
Fubing Su is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a member of the Asian Studies program at Vassar College. He studies political economic issues in China and recent research interests include grassroots democracy, rural governance, land taking, public finance, cadre management, and China’s growth model.
Su received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Before joining Vassar College, he taught at Brown University for two years.
Todd Lappin studied Chinese history at Brown University. He lives in San Francisco.
Is Beijing doubling down on its longstanding threat to reclaim Taiwan by force?
A suicide bomber attacked a park in Heze in China’s Shandong province, killing two (including the bomber) and injuring 24, with three people receiving “relatively severe” injuries.
While China stood with the Western powers in insisting Iran give up its ambitions for nuclear weapons, Beijing took Iran’s side in calling for more rapid sanctions relief.
