Features

10.30.20

State of Surveillance

Jessica Batke & Mareike Ohlberg
Across China, in its most crowded cities and tiniest hamlets, government officials are on an unprecedented surveillance shopping spree. The coordination of the resulting millions of cameras and other snooping technology spread across the country...

Why China’s Xi Jinping is Unlikely to Anoint a Successor

South China Morning Post
Hu Chunhua and Chen Miner unlikely to win promotion to Communist Party’s top decision-making body

Books

04.21.17

A New Deal for China’s Workers?

Cynthia Estlund
China’s labor landscape is changing, and it is transforming the global economy in ways that we cannot afford to ignore. Once-silent workers have found their voice, organizing momentous protests, such as the 2010 Honda strikes, and demanding a better deal. China’s leaders have responded not only with repression but with reforms. Are China’s workers on the verge of a breakthrough in industrial relations and labor law reminiscent of the American New Deal?In A New Deal for China’s Workers? Cynthia Estlund views this changing landscape through the comparative lens of America’s twentieth-century experience with industrial unrest. China’s leaders hope to replicate the widely shared prosperity, political legitimacy, and stability that flowed from America’s New Deal, but they are irrevocably opposed to the independent trade unions and mass mobilization that were central to bringing it about. Estlund argues that the specter of an independent labor movement, seen as an existential threat to China’s one-party regime, is both driving and constraining every facet of its response to restless workers.China’s leaders draw on an increasingly sophisticated toolkit in their effort to contain worker activism. The result is a surprising mix of repression and concession, confrontation and cooptation, flaws and functionality, rigidity and pragmatism. If China’s laborers achieve a New Deal, it will be a New Deal with Chinese characteristics, very unlike what workers in the West achieved in the last century. Estlund’s sharp observations and crisp comparative analysis make China’s labor unrest and reform legible to Western readers. —Harvard University Press{chop}

China Has an Irrational Fear of a “Black Invasion” Bringing Drugs, Crime, and Interracial Marriage

Joanna Chiu
Quartz
A Chinese politician proudly shared with reporters his proposal on how to “solve the problem of the black population in Guangdong.” The province is widely known in China to have many African migrants.

Curbs on Foreign Investment Cut for Four FTZs

Zhong Nan
China Daily
Pilot free trade zones in Tianjin, Guangdong, Fujian, and Shanghai now have fewer restrictions.

Viewpoint

05.16.14

Government Steps Up To Labor’s Demands

Kevin Slaten
On April 14, most of the 40,000 workers at the Dongguan Yue Yuen shoe factory—supplier to Nike, Adidas, and other international brands—began what would become a two-week work stoppage. While there are thousands of strikes in China every year, the...

Still a Model? Revisiting the Rebel Village of Wukan

Josh Chin
WSJ: China Real Time Report
A little over a year ago, residents of the small southern Chinese fishing village of Wukan ransacked the offices of the local government in protest over a land grab by local officials. The death in police custody of one of the protest leaders a few...

Chinese Villagers Threaten Fresh Protests

Rahul Jacob and Zhou Ping
Financial Times
Zhang Jiancheng was a rebel with a cause. His detention with four other protesters in December sparked a stand-off in the southern Chinese village of Wukan, where 13,000 people faced down police in an 11-day siege.After the provincial...

Online Criticism Leads to Suspension of Military Official over Flight Fight

Josh Chin
WSJ: China Real Time Report
A Chinese military official accused last week of assaulting a flight attendant has been suspended following an explosion of outrage online fed in part by rare criticism from state-run media. Col. Fang Daguo, a political commissar for the...

Caixin Media

08.31.12

In Guangdong, Tea Oil Greases Official Palms

In the financial documents for a Guangdong province grower and processor of tea seed oil is a list of key shareholders who also happen to be the relatives of local government officials.Off the record, Guangdong Xindadi Biotechnology Co. Ltd. and its...

China’s Boldest Media: Losing the Battle?

David Bandurski
China Media Project
Over the past few years there have been repeated signs that newspapers in the southern province of Guangdong, long known to be among the China’s most outspoken, have come under intensified pressure from the authorities. CMP reported last May that a...

Raw Sewage Dumped in China’s Pearl River Delta, Daily Says

Nicholas Wadhams
Bloomberg
The report said that 30 percent of rivers in eastern Guangdong are polluted, threatening the health of people who live along their banks. Guangdong, with a population of 104 million people, has China’s largest economy and is one of the world’s...

Reports

04.30.12

Guangdong Leads Calls to Break up “Vested Interests” and Revive Reform

Joseph Fewsmith
He Jianan
China Leadership Monitor
In September 2011, a protest in a Guangdong village threatened to embarrass the province and its party secretary, Wang Yang, who is a candidate for membership on the powerful Politburo Standing Committee when the 18th Party Congress meets later in...