Chinese Activists Are in Shock over Cuts to U.S. Human Rights Programs

By Thomas Kellogg on May 30, 2025

On April 22, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a wide-ranging reorganization of the State Department. Though the details of the restructuring have yet to be published, it seems clear that human rights will be downgraded, and a number of staff positions related to human rights and other key thematic concerns will be cut. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) was singled out for particular scorn by Secretary Rubio: He falsely labeled it a “platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas,” and claimed that it pursued “radical causes at taxpayer expense.”

How Will the Trump Presidency Change EU-China Relations?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Frans-Paul van der Putten & more on May 12, 2025

Over the past few years, European countries have started to line up with the United States on China policy. But now, as Donald Trump destroys the trust European countries had in America, China is stepping up, promising stability and consistency, if nothing else. Can European countries maintain a lasting political and economic relationship with China? Are we facing a global decoupling from the U.S. and a strengthening of ties or recoupling with China?

Marc Julienne

on May 9, 2025

Marc Julienne is Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri). He focuses on China’s foreign and security policy. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO, Paris), where he now teaches international relations in Northeast Asia.

Ludovica Meacci

on May 9, 2025

Ludovica Meacci is a Ph.D. researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Service Institute (RUSI). Her research focuses on Chinese technology policy and U.S.-EU-China relations. She holds an M.Sc. in Contemporary China Studies from SOAS University of London and was a 2017 Yenching Scholar at Peking University. Before starting her Ph.D., she worked on Chinese foreign policy and EU-Asia relations in different roles, including at the Secretariat of the European Parliament, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, and Jane’s Information Group. She also worked as a freelance journalist and analyst. Her work has appeared in the Financial Times, South China Morning Post, Foreign Policy, and ISPI, among others.

The Forgotten ‘Jeep Babies’ of China

An Excerpt from ‘The Adoption Plan’

By Jack Neubauer on May 8, 2025

The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism tells the story of how the cause of saving children in China ignited a new global humanitarian imagination and precipitated a transnational struggle for control over the vast quantities of aid that flowed into China on their behalf. In this excerpt, I look at the mixed-race children of Chinese women and U.S. soldiers in post-WWII China. Referred to as “jeep babies,” the fate of these children briefly became a cause célèbre in Chinese society in the months following the end of the war. By 1947, all public discussion of jeep babies had abruptly ceased, and they have since been completely forgotten to history: my research did not reveal a single mention of them in Chinese or English since 1947.

Jack Neubauer

on May 4, 2025

Jack Neubauer is a historian of China and the modern world. He received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and completed the research and writing for his first book, The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism, while an assistant professor in the Department of History at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and the recipient of the 2020 Fass-Sandin Prize for Best Article from the Society for the History of Children and Youth. He is currently a policy analyst at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.