Jia Zhangke on Finding Freedom in China on Film
on October 7, 2015
Jia Zhangke is among the most celebrated filmmakers China has ever produced—outside of China.

Jia Zhangke is among the most celebrated filmmakers China has ever produced—outside of China.

If you look carefully at how things are actually made in China—from shirts to toys, apple juice to oil rigs—you see a reality that contradicts every widely-held notion about the world’s so-called economic powerhouse. From the inside looking out, China is not a manufacturing juggernaut. It’s a Lilliputian. Nor is it a killer of American jobs. It’s a huge job creator. Rising China is importing goods from America in such volume that millions of U.S. jobs are sustained through Chinese trade and investment. In Unmade in China, entrepreneur and Georgetown University business professor Jeremy R. Haft lifts the lid on the hidden world of China’s intricate supply chains. Informed by years of experience building new companies in China, Haft’s unique, insider’s view reveals a startling picture of an economy which struggles to make baby formula safely, much less a nuclear power plant. Using firm-level data and recent case studies, Unmade in China tells the story of systemic risk in Chinese manufacturing and why this is both really bad and really good news for America. —Polity Press
Elizabeth C. Economy, CFR Asia Unbound (October 6, 2015)
Dan Harris, China Law Blog (September 15, 2015)
Peter Neville-Hadley, The Wall Street Journal (July 23, 2015)

Director Jia Zhangke on set of Mountains May Depart.

Actor Zhao Tao, right

Actors Zhang Yi, left, and Zhao Tao

A man from the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan has been making a living by looking like US President Barack Obama.
On October 5, a share of this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine went to 84-year-old Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou for her discovery, decades ago, of the anti-malarial drug artemisinin. Tu and her team made the discovery during the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of chaos and militant Communist ideology in the 1960s and 1970s.

Across China, grown-ups are sporting plastic decorations on their heads in the shape of vegetables, fruit and flowers.