Books
11.05.14

China 1945
A riveting account of the watershed moment in America’s dealings with China that forever altered the course of East-West relations.As 1945 opened, America was on surprisingly congenial terms with China’s Communist rebels—their soldiers treated their American counterparts as heroes, rescuing airmen shot down over enemy territory. Chinese leaders talked of a future in which American money and technology would help lift China out of poverty. Mao Zedong himself held friendly meetings with U.S. emissaries, vowing to them his intention of establishing an American-style democracy in China.By year’s end, however, cordiality had been replaced by chilly hostility and distrust. Chinese Communist soldiers were setting ambushes for American marines in north China; Communist newspapers were portraying the United States as an implacable imperialist enemy; civil war in China was erupting. The pattern was set for a quarter century of almost total Sino-American mistrust, with the devastating wars in Korea and Vietnam among the consequences.Richard Bernstein here tells the incredible story of that year’s sea change, brilliantly analyzing its many components, from ferocious infighting among U.S. diplomats, military leaders, and opinion makers to the complex relations between Mao and his patron, Stalin.On the American side, we meet experienced “China hands” John Paton Davies and John Stewart Service, whose efforts at negotiation made them prey to accusations of Communist sympathy; FDR’s special ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, a decorated general and self-proclaimed cowboy; and Time journalist, Henry Luce, whose editorials helped turn the tide of American public opinion. On the Chinese side, Bernstein reveals the ascendant Mao and his intractable counterpart, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek; and the indispensable Zhou Enlai.A tour de force of narrative history, China 1945 examines the first episode in which American power and good intentions came face-to-face with a powerful Asian revolutionary movement, and challenges familiar assumptions about the origins of modern Sino-American relations. —Knopf {chop}
Media
10.29.14
Foot Spas, Steamed Buns, and Midday Drinking
It may not be Monty Python’s famous “Ministry of Silly Walks,” but it’s close.The Office of Forbidding Midday Alcohol Consumption, a local government initiative in China’s southern Henan province which seeks to reduce alcohol consumption at...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.27.14China’s Assault on Corruption Enters Executive Suite
Wall Street Journal
Communist Party leaders plan to slash the compensation of the top executives at China's largest state-owned companies over the next few months to make sure only those truly committed to the party run them.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.27.14China Began Push Against Hong Kong Elections in ’50s
New York Times
Beginning in the 1950s, the colonial governors who ran Hong Kong repeatedly sought to introduce popular elections but abandoned those efforts in the face of pressure by Communist Party leaders in Beijing.
Conversation
10.17.14
Rule of Law—Why Now?
In a recent essay, “How China’s Leaders Will Rule on the Law,” Carl Minzner looks at the question of why China’s leaders have announced they will emphasize rule of law at the upcoming Chinese Communist Party plenum slated to take place in Beijing...
Media
10.15.14
Jiang Zemin Unplugged
Given the leadership styles of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, who have been China’s supreme leaders over the past twelve years, it is an almost shocking experience to look back at these two videos (the first of which circulated last week on social media...
Viewpoint
10.15.14
How China’s Leaders Will Rule on the Law
Last week, as the world watched the student demonstrations in Hong Kong, China’s Politburo announced the dates for the Communist Party’s annual plenary session would be from October 20-23. As in previous years, top leaders will gather in Beijing to...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.01.14Full Text of the Chinese Communist Party’s Message to Hong Kong
Quartz
"Cherish Positive Growth: Defend Hong Kong’s Prosperity and Stability," People’s Daily, October 1, 2014, translated by Quartz.
Reports
10.01.14
Avoiding the Blind Alley: China’s Economic Overhaul and Its Global Implications
Daniel H. Rosen
Asia Society
President Xi Jinping announced a sweeping overhaul for China’s economy in November 2013, with pledges to make market forces decisive, treat homegrown and foreign investors with the same laws and regulations, and change the mission statement of the...
Culture
09.23.14
Contact Lenses
Will we all become “Chinese?” International New York Times correspondent Didi Kirsten Tatlow ironically asked recently. The question plays both on our fears over China’s economic power and on reflections on the NSA files released by Edward Snowden...
Media
09.12.14
A New Definition of Chinese Patriotism
China’s ruling Communist Party has a message for Chinese citizens: You are for us, or you are against us.That’s the takeaway from a widely discussed September 10 opinion piece in pro-party tabloid Global Times, in which Chen Xiankui, a professor at...
Books
09.02.14

Cities and Stability
China's management of urbanization is an under-appreciated factor in the regime's longevity. The Chinese Communist Party fears "Latin Americanization"—the emergence of highly unequal megacities with their attendant slums and social unrest. Such cities threaten the survival of nondemocratic regimes. To combat the threat, many regimes, including China's, favor cities in policymaking. Cities and Stability shows this "urban bias" to be a Faustian Bargain: cities may be stabilized for a time, but the massive in-migration from the countryside that results can generate the conditions for political upheaval. Through its hukou system of internal migration restrictions, China has avoided this dilemma, simultaneously aiding urbanites and keeping farmers in the countryside. The system helped prevent social upheaval even during the Great Recession, when tens of millions of laid-off migrant workers dispersed from coastal cities. Jeremy Wallace's powerful account forces us to rethink the relationship between cities and political stability throughout the developing world. —Oxford University Press {chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
08.02.14The War of Words in China
New York Times
These are challenging days for foreigners in China, who in the past year or so have increasingly found themselves caught up in a war of words that paint Westerners as conscripts in the army of “hostile foreign forces” seeking to thwart China’s rise.
Sinica Podcast
08.02.14
The Rule of Law in China
from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, Jeremy and David are joined by Donald Clarke, a professor at George Washington University where he specializes in Chinese law, for a discussion of what is happening with the Zhou Yongkang corruption scandal, as well as ongoing...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.31.14China Harasses U.S. Tech Companies
New York Times
China has opened what appear to be politically motivated antitrust investigations into American technology companies like Microsoft and Qualcomm. Foreign companies operating in the Communist country could be in for more intense harassment than ever...
Caixin Media
07.31.14
Ex-Politburo Members Accused of ‘Serious Discipline Violations’ Always Face Courts
After much speculation, the axe has finally fallen on Zhou Yongkang, the former public security chief and member of the Politburo Standing Committee, indicating the Communist Party’s campaign against corruption will grant no exceptions to the...
Media
07.30.14
Paper Tiger
For 10 months, the fate of Zhou Yongkang existed in a space of plausible deniability. Respected Western media outlets had reported that the 71-year-old Zhou, a retired official who served as China's much-feared domestic security czar from 2007...
Media
07.30.14
Say It Ain’t So, Zhou
It was an exchange perfectly tailored for modern Chinese politics: alternately unscripted and cagey, chummy but laced with a hint of menace. At a Beijing press conference following a Chinese Communist Party meeting in early March, a reporter for...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.29.14China Puts Ex-Security Chief Zhou Yongkang Under Investigation
Wall Street Journal
China launched a formal investigation into one of the Communist Party’s most senior figures, lifting a cloak of immunity that has shielded the country’s highest ranks for at least 25 years, in President Xi Jinping’s boldest move yet to solidify his...
Conversation
07.24.14
Alibaba: How Big a Deal Is It?
When Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba goes public some time after Labor Day it is expected be one the largest initial public offerings in history. This week, a story in The New York Times shed light on ties between Alibaba and the sons and grandsons...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.24.14Beijing Has Top-Secret View of China’s Employment
Wall Street Journal
China’s government knows something investors don’t—well, a lot of things actually. But that is especially true when it comes to the country’s labor market.
Books
07.23.14

The New Emperors
How does one become the leader of the world's newest superpower? And who holds the real power in the Chinese system? China has become the powerhouse of the world economy and home to one in five of the world's population, yet we know almost nothing of the people who lead it. In The New Emperors, the noted China expert Kerry Brown journeys deep into the heart of the Communist Party. China's system might have its roots in peasant rebellion but it is now firmly under the control of a power-conscious Beijing elite, almost half of whose members are related directly to former senior Party leaders. Brown reveals the intrigue, scandal, and murder surrounding the internal battle raging between two China's: one founded by Mao on Communist principles, and a modern China in which 'to get rich is glorious.' At the center of it all sits the latest Party Secretary, Xi Jinping—the son of a revolutionary, with links both to big business and to the People's Liberation Army. His rise to power is symbolic of the new dragons leading the world's next superpower. —I.B. Tauris {chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
07.22.14Market Reforms, Fight against Corruption Go Hand in Hand, Expert Says
Peking University’s Li Chengyan argues the party is taking a two-pronged approach to reform, and institutional changes at local level will help make anti-graft campaign’s gains permanent.
ChinaFile Recommends
07.16.14Note to Cadres: Hands Off the Black Audi and Chauffeur
New York Times
Can you take away that ultimate perk of the respectable cadre—the black car with intimidatingly tinted windows, an equally intimidating medley of official insignia, passes and a faithful driver? We’re about to find out.
ChinaFile Recommends
07.15.14China’s Campaign Against Corruption Is Huge. Will It Do Any Good?
Time
President Xi has netted more “tigers,” or top-level officials, than his predecessor Hu Jintao did during his entire decade in power.
ChinaFile Recommends
07.13.14China Requires 30% of State Cars Use Alternative Energy
Bloomberg
China is mandating that electric cars make up at least 30 percent of government vehicle purchases by 2016, the latest measure to fight pollution and cut energy use after exempting the autos from a purchase tax.
Infographics
07.03.14
Spoils of the ‘Tiger’ Hunt
The Chinese Communist Party announced the expulsion from its ranks of Xu Caihou, who before his retirement in 2012 was one of the highest ranking officers in the People’s Liberation Army. He also became the highest-ranking member of the Chinese...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.02.14‘There Are No Rules in China’
Foreign Policy
When dissident author Murong Xuecun returns home, he says he will tell Beijing authorities they can come and get him.
ChinaFile Recommends
06.30.14Top China Military Official General Xu Caihou Accused
BBC
One of China's most senior military officials has been accused of accepting bribes and expelled from the Communist Party, state media report.
ChinaFile Recommends
06.17.14As China’s Leader Fights Graft, His Relatives Shed Assets
New York Times
As President Xi Jinping prepares to tackle what may be the biggest cases of official corruption in more than six decades of Communist Party rule, new evidence suggests that he has been pushing his own family to sell hundreds of millions of dollars...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.17.14China's Clampdown on ‘Evil Cults’
New York Times
The government’s anti-religion campaign is not borne of concern for public security stemming from a horrific murder. This is a concerted effort to bring independent churches and their followers into line.
ChinaFile Recommends
06.13.14China Arrests Rights Lawyer Who Fought Labor Camps
ABC
The dramatic turnaround of Pu Zhiqiang highlights the thin line that activist lawyers often find themselves having to walk if they seek to drum up public support for causes that embarrass the ruling Communist Party: success can come at great...
The NYRB China Archive
06.03.14
The Tanks and the People
from New York Review of Books
Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.”My father knew what he was talking about. His courage had been broken, by countless political campaigns...
Features
05.27.14
China’s Experiment with Deliberative Democracy
Chinese pro-democracy protests begun in the late spring of 1989 led to the brutal military suppression on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 25 years ago this June 4. Around the world, discussions of the events of that spring have been well underway for...
Books
05.22.14

Age of Ambition
From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals—fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture—consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth?Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail. —Farrar, Straus, and Giroux {chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
05.15.14Don’t Call Me Dude, Boss or Bro. It’s Comrade to You
New York Times
A new notice demands greater “naming discipline” from party members and officials, warning that using “vulgar” terms of address in the workplace was “wrecking inner-party democracy.”
ChinaFile Recommends
05.05.14Young Party Members ‘Top Earners’
South China Morning Post
Survey of China's 'post-80s' generation finds high pay tied to official status inside the Chinese Communist Party.
ChinaFile Recommends
04.22.14China Could Become the World’s Largest Christian Country
Slate
China likely already has more Protestants—an estimated 58 million—than South Africa or Brazil, major centers of evangelical revival, and 67 million Christians in all—larger than the total population of France. More people go to...
Viewpoint
04.20.14
The Specter of June Fourth
If yesterday was typical, about 1,400 children in Africa died of malaria. It is a preventable, treatable disease, and the young victims lost their lives through no faults of their own. Why it is that human beings accept a fact like this as an...
ChinaFile Recommends
04.15.14The Mystery Shrouding China’s Communist Party Suicides
Wall Street Journal
At least 54 Chinese officials died of “unnatural causes” in 2013, and that more than 40 percent of those deaths were suicides.
ChinaFile Recommends
04.14.14Can Forbidden Rules Teach Officials How to Behave?
Global Times
A Sichuan newspaper listed "ten forbidden behaviors" for officials—such as don't talk to the public with hands behind your back and don't ask others to carry the suitcase for you.
Media
04.11.14
Is Jesus Really Hotter Than Mao on China’s Social Media?
It’s easier to talk about Jesus than Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping on Weibo, China’s massive Twitter-like social media platform.The atheist Chinese Communist Party, known for its sometimes heavy-handed policies...
Infographics
03.20.14
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright
from EG365
The greatest unsolved mystery in China right now is not the disappearance of Malaysian airliner MH370 but the fate of Zhou Yongkang, the feared former head of China’s security apparatus. From 2007 to 2012 a member of China’s top political body, the...
Media
02.06.14
Beijing’s State Secrets Law—Still Broad, Still Opaque
Beijing may be whittling back its widely reviled state secrets laws—but given their opacity, it’s hard to say for sure. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang signed a regulation, announced February 2, that would prohibit Chinese government organs from “using...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.06.14China, the Death Star of Emerging Markets
Bloomberg
On any list of banking accidents waiting to happen, China is assured a place at the very top. But could a crash there take the entire global economy down with it?
ChinaFile Recommends
02.06.14Xi Jinping’s Inner Circle: The Shaanxi Gang
Brookings Institution
This analysis is an excerpt of a paper examining the members of Xi Jinping's inner circle. It specifically looks at the “Shaanxi Gang,” national leaders tied to Shaanxi province whose ascent to leadership paralleled Xi’s own.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.22.14Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
The data illustrates the outsized dependency of China's economy on tiny islands thousands of miles away.
Media
01.17.14
You’ve Got Mail: Chinese Communist Party Received Almost Two Million Complaints in 2013
In 2013, China’s Communist Party disciplinary organs received an eye-popping 1.95 million citizen complaints about officials. This is a 49.2 percent jump from 2012, according to a January 13 report from state-run website China News Online—but...
Viewpoint
01.14.14
Xi, Mao, and China’s Search for a Usable Past
Since its founding, the United States has had understandable pride in its great achievements, but also has had to reckon with its complex moral history—beginning but hardly ending with the fact that our original Constitution accepted the evil of...
Conversation
01.06.14
Will Xi Jinping Bring a Positive New Day to China?
Chinese President Xi Jinping, just over a year in office, recently made a rare appearance in public in a Beijing restaurant, buying a cheap lunch and paying for it himself. Shortly thereafter, President Xi delivered a brief televised New Year...
Other
12.23.13
[Transcript] One Year Later, China’s New Leaders
Nearly a year to the day after seven new leaders ascended to their posts on the Standing Committee of China’s Politburo, the Asia Society held a public conversation with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos; Dr. Susan Shirk of the University of California,...
The NYRB China Archive
11.21.13
Dreams of a Different China
from New York Review of Books
Last November, China’s newly installed leader, Xi Jinping, asked his fellow Chinese to help realize a “Chinese dream” of national rejuvenation. In the months since then, his talk has been seen as a marker in the new leadership’s thinking, especially...
Media
11.14.13
Westerners Aren’t the Only Ones Flummoxed by China’s Reform Plans
After the Third Plenum, a high-level meeting to discuss China’s future, ended on November 12, Beijing released a major document likely to affect many of its 1.3 billion citizens’ lives for years. Western media responded to the 5,000-plus character...
Features
11.08.13
Document 9: A ChinaFile Translation
This weekend, China’s leaders gather in Beijing for meetings widely expected to determine the shape of China’s economy, as well as the nation’s progress, over the next decade. What exactly the outcome of this Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party...
Viewpoint
11.08.13
China, One Year Later
In November 2012, seven men were appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s supreme governing body. At the time, economic headwinds, nationalist protests, and the Bo Xilai scandal presented huge challenges for the regime. Would the...
Viewpoint
11.07.13
Deciphering Xi Jinping’s Dream
On November 9, the Chinese Communist Party will host its Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee. This conference will be a key to deciphering the ruling philosophy of the new Chinese leadership, who will run the country for the...
Viewpoint
11.01.13
What the Heck is China’s ‘Third Plenum’ and Why Should You Care?
China’s economy is already two-thirds the size of the economy of the U.S., and it’s been growing five times as fast. But now, China’s economy is beginning to slow and is facing a raft of difficult problems. If China’s leaders don’t address...
Conversation
10.25.13
Can State-Run Capitalism Absorb the Shocks of ‘Creative Destruction’?
Following are ChinaFile Conversation participants’ reactions to “China: Superpower or Superbust?” in the November-December issue of The National Interest in which author Ian Bremmer says that China’s state-capitalism is ill-equipped to absorb the...
Features
10.25.13
Bo Xilai May Have Gotten Off Easy
On October 25, the Shandong High People’s Court rejected the appeal of Bo Xilai, the former Party Secretary of Chongqing who on September 22 was convicted of bribe-taking, embezzlement, and abuse of power and sentenced to life in prison.At the end...
The NYRB China Archive
10.15.13
Old Dreams for a New China
from New York Review of Books
Ever since China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, first uttered the phrase “China Dream” last year, people in China and abroad have been scrambling to decipher its meaning. Many nations have “dreams”; in Canada, the country’s most prominent popular...