Hong Kong is home to more than 330,000 foreign domestic workers, most of whom come from the Philippines and Indonesia. Like immigrants everywhere, many send a portion of their income back to their home countries.
Photographer Liu Lei spent 13 years photographing his hometown in rural Shandong, seven of those years chronicling the life of Wang Zhibao, a villager from the town. He followed Wang through major life events and through more quotidian moments.
In China, the robot revolution has arrived. Major manufacturers such as Foxconn are already replacing their human workers with robots, and more factories are set to follow suit. This essay by Tencent photographer Feng Haiyong explores the future of manufacturing and the fate of China’s massive low-skill migrant workforce.
More than 150,000 Chinese soldiers fought and died during the Korean War. Many of their bodies were never returned to China but buried in mass graves in North Korea. More than 60 years later, family members of these soldiers traveled to North Korea, many of them for the first time, to honor their fathers before Tomb-Sweeping Day.
The China NGO Project has just posted English translations of the official forms needed to apply for a representative office or file for a temporary activity. You can access them all here.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently published a new report by Edwin Rekosh exploring ways in which human rights NGOs might rethink how they approach their work internationally. Using a “business model” framework to restructure how they conceptualize non-governmental human rights work, Rekosh argues, is increasingly important in an international environment that sees multiple governments restricting foreign funding for domestic NGOs. As an example of innovation in building partnerships with other entities, Rekosh brings up the example of PILnet in China, which is “working with a large global brand to develop ongoing relationships between supply chain auditors and factory decisionmakers, on the one hand, and local labor lawyers connected to Chinese civil society organizations, on the other, in a training and consultation process supported by the global brand.”
As a transgender woman from a remote village in Yunnan province, Ji Danuo experienced severe discrimination. She decided to move to Kunming where she met her partner, Lu Hua. The two have been together for two years. In this piece from Tencent’s “Living” Channel, photographer Zhou Qiang follows Ji’s quest to save enough money for sex reassignment surgery in Thailand.
In 2013, photographer Li Dong moved into an apartment building in the southern city of Guangzhou. As he settled in, he began to document the lives of his neighbors, who were predominantly African immigrants, a project that would continue for eight months.
David Rank became the leading diplomat for one of America’s most important embassies during the transition when Iowa governor Terry Branstad formally succeeded former Montana senator Max Baucus as U.S. Ambassador to China on May 24, 2017. He soon found himself in a moral quandary: Carry out what he believed to be a deeply misguided order from the President of the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, or resign in protest. He chose the latter, becoming the highest-ranking State Department official to do so—thus far—under the Trump administration.
