If the stories in this edition of Depth of Field share a common thread—apart from their distinguished photographic storytelling—it’s their interest in the flux and churn of life in China in 2019, where nothing seems fixed and pressure of constant movement reshapes the contours of institutions and of individual lives.
The Sino-Vietnamese War is rarely remembered or discussed today. But 40 years ago, the war appeared to herald a tectonic shift in regional and global politics and helped forge a close, more trusting relationship between the leader of the free world and the world’s largest autocracy. China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam demonstrated that Beijing stood on the American side in the global Cold War—a message that President Jimmy Carter embraced. China may have been a brutal dictatorship, but the fact that it went to war against America’s erstwhile enemy, Vietnam, pointed to a commonality of interests between China and the United States.
Yingyi Ma is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at Syracuse University. She is a sociologist of education and migration. Her co-edited book, Learning and Living Globalization: Understanding International Students from Asia in American Universities (Springer, 2017) has won an Honorable Mention from Comparative and International Education Association Study Abroad and International Students SIG. Her forthcoming monograph, Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese Undergraduates Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education, is scheduled to be released by Columbia University Press later this year.
The Shandong PSB Foreign NGO Management Office recently publicized the two-year anniversary of the Foreign NGO Law. Carrying along publicity materials, the provincial PSB visited the nine foreign NGOs registered in Shandong. The Dezhou, Weihai, Binzhou, and Zibo city PSBs set up displays in high-traffic areas in their cities to promote the key provisions of the law. The Jinan, Qingdao, and Weifang PSBs visited foreign NGOs in their respective jurisdictions to explain management policies and to get NGO feedback. Dezhou, Weihai, and Yantai cities also promoted the law through Weibo and WeChat.
Daniel Tobin is a member of the China Studies faculty at National Intelligence University in Bethesda, Maryland. He has served as a China specialist in the Department of Defense since 2004, most recently as Senior Analyst at the United States Indo-Pacific Command’s China Strategic Focus Group. He holds an M.A. in China Studies from Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and a B.A. from Wesleyan University’s College of Social Studies, an interdisciplinary program in history, government, economics, and social theory. He studied Chinese language at Beijing Normal University and the Capital University of Business and Economics.
Are foreign NGOs able to use temporary activity filings—which are officially only allowed to last a maximum of one year—to run longer-term grants or programs? Is it possible for international organizations to file year after year for the same activities? A review of temporary activity filings through the end of January 2019 suggests that this is indeed possible, though we continue to lack information about instances, if any, where such “renewals” were denied.
The forty-five-year-old investigative journalist Jiang Xue is one of the most influential members of a group of journalists who came of age in the early 2000s, taking advantage of new—if temporary—freedoms created by the Internet to investigate pressing social issues. She worked at Chinese Business View (Huashangbao) until 2014, when she quit as its opinion-page editor over censorship. Since then, she has kept writing to an ever-shrinking audience on social media, most notably about the wives of several high-profile civil rights lawyers who have been arrested.
When Roderick MacFarquhar passed away on February 10, 2019, I was left with a deep regret: that our friendship had been too short.
“He can be very intimidating. Don’t be put off by it; it’s just a mannerism,” Nancy Hearst, the librarian at Harvard’s Fairbank Center, warned me before taking me to meet him for the first time.
Bao Pu is the Publisher and Founder of New Century Press in Hong Kong, best known for its Chinese-language memoirs and historical and political titles including Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, and Mao’s Great Famine. Bao is originally from Beijing, but has lived in the United States and Hong Kong since 1989. He studied economics and public administration at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, is a veteran of human rights advocacy, and previously worked in various consulting and managerial positions before becoming a publisher. Bao was awarded the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award in 2010.
