Jessica Batke

on March 22, 2017

Jessica Batke is a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) and a Senior Fellow at ChinaFile, where she researches China’s internet censorship system and its wider impacts on the world. She is also a Senior European Fellow at Cybersecurity for Democracy and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS).

From 2017 to 2025, Batke was a writer and editor at ChinaFile, most recently as ChinaFile’s Senior Editor for Investigations. She covered China's Foreign NGO Law, domestic surveillance, internet censorship, and the Party-state’s approaches to governance. She served as a Research Analyst in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 2009 to 2017, where she focused on domestic social issues, including developments in Tibet and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In 2016, she was a Visiting Academic Fellow at MERICS in Berlin.

Batke holds a B.A. in Linguistics from Pitzer College and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University.

Yi People Shed Tradition and Join the Migrant Force | Tencent

on March 22, 2017

The Yi minority live mainly in Yunnan and Sichuan, landlocked provinces of southwest China. Disadvantaged at home, some Yi move to China’s coast in search of work, joining the nation’s larger migrant workforce. Photographer Zhou Qiang followed a group of Yi migrants to Shenzhen, a high-tech manufacturing hub just north of Hong Kong and home to more than 11 million people, where he photographed their new lives in workers’ dormitories.

The Routine Farewells of Left-Behind Children | Sixth Tone

on March 22, 2017

For many of China’s rural children whose parents are migrant laborers, the annual Lantern Festival is a bittersweet holiday. The festival marks the end of the traditional Lunar New Year, when many migrant-worker parents leave their jobs and return home to their children for roughly two weeks. The festival signals it’s time to part again and get back to work, often far away from home.

Refugees from Myanmar, Migrant Workers, and the Lantern Festival

A Monthly Roundup of China’s Best Photojournalism

By Ye Ming, Yan Cong & more on March 22, 2017

This month, we feature galleries published in February that showcase photographers’ interest in China’s borders and its medical woes, the lives of its minorities and their traditions and customs, and—in the case of Dustin Shum’s work—in a visual understanding of mental illness.

Eleven Countries Signed a Letter Slamming China for Torturing Lawyers. The U.S. Did Not.

By Simon Denyer on March 22, 2017

When 11 embassies signed on to a joint letter criticizing China over “credible claims” that lawyers and human rights activists have been tortured while in detention, there were two notable abstentions.

Law, Politics
Human Rights, U.S. State Department, Rex Tillerson, Dissidents and Activists