Jessica Batke is a ChinaFile Senior Editor. She is an expert on China’s domestic political and social affairs, and served as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research Analyst for nearly eight years prior to joining ChinaFile. In 2016, she was a Visiting Academic Fellow at MERICS in Berlin, where she published papers on Chinese leadership politics and created databases to catalogue hard-to-find, high-level Chinese policy documents and details about policy advisory groups. She is proficient in Mandarin.
Last Updated: May 10, 2018
Viewpoint
03.18.20
‘This Is Not Forensic Genetics Anymore. This Is Surveillance.’
Yves Moreau, a professor specializing in human clinical genomics, had been emailing with Promega since 2016, warning its communications department first about how Promega’s products might be used in a proposed DNA databasing project in Kuwait, and...
03.02.20
Visually Understanding the Data on Foreign NGO Representative Offices and Temporary Activities
The China NGO Project has created the following visualizations based on data available on the Ministry of Public Security website, as well as on our own research. To analyze foreign NGO representative offices, we looked at organizations’ countries/...
Features
02.19.20
American Company Sold DNA Analysis Equipment to Security Officials in Xinjiang, Documents Show
In 2015, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau announced it planned to purchase equipment from the U.S.-based biotechnology company Promega for the purpose of analyzing DNA and adding it to a national database,...
01.03.20
‘The New Normal’ for Foreign NGOs in 2020
The China NGO Project has, since its inception, been heavily focused on Chinese government-provided data as a means to understand the environment for foreign NGOs there. However, taking stock of the three years that the Foreign NGO Law has been in...
05.20.19
What Would Amending Hong Kong’s Law on Extradition Mean for International Non-Profits?
Hong Kong legislators are currently engaged in a fierce struggle over the proposed passing of a bill that would expand Hong Kong's policy to allow for extradition, on a case-by-case basis, to countries with which the territory does not have...
Viewpoint
03.15.19
Is This the Last Dalai Lama?
This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet. His departure exposed the rift between the Tibetan faithful and the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), one which has not closed in the six decades since—and which threatens...
Features
01.08.19
Where Did the One Million Figure for Detentions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From?
As journalists and scholars have reported in recent months on the campaign of religious and cultural repression and incarceration taking place in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a central question has emerged: How many people has China’s government...
01.03.19
Two Years of the Foreign NGO Law: How Did 2018’s Registrations and Filings Stack up against 2017’s?
As we greet 2019, we have now seen two full years of Foreign NGO Law implementation in China. If foreign NGOs thought that 2017 had a “crossing the river by feeling for stones” sense to it, 2018 was the year that registration and filing processes...
12.20.18
What More Do We Know about Recent Detentions and Foreign NGOs?
More than a week after the detention of two Canadian citizens, we know very little about the nature of the charges against them. Of particular concern to the foreign NGO community is the detention of Michael Kovrig, an employee of the non-profit...
12.12.18
Foreign NGO Employee Detained in Beijing
On Monday night, Chinese authorities detained Michael Kovrig of the Brussels-based non-profit International Crisis Group (ICG) in Beijing. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested—though did not definitively state—that Kovrig may have...
09.07.18
Shanghai Labor Union Preventing “Enemy Infiltration” along with Managing Foreign NGOs
In an official document dated late July, the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions, the city’s branch of the country’s official, Party-affiliated trade union, outlined the major themes of its work going forward, including preventing “enemy...
Features
08.23.18
What Satellite Images Can Show Us about ‘Re-education’ Camps in Xinjiang
Claims that “re-education” camps are merely vocational training centers seem even less credible after one looks at the work of Shawn Zhang. A law student focusing on jurisprudence at the University of British Columbia in Canada, in May Zhang began...