Conversation

04.29.22

Shanghai’s Lockdown

Kenton Thibaut, Guobin Yang & more
In late March, China started its largest lockdown in more than two years, with most of Shanghai’s 26 million residents confined to their homes in an effort to battle the rapid spread of Omicron. As of mid-April, 45 cities across the country were...

Books

10.08.19

The Shanghai Free Taxi

Frank Langfitt
Public Affairs: China—America’s most important competitor—is at a turning point. With economic growth slowing, Chinese people face inequality and uncertainty as their leaders tighten control at home and project power abroad.NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt describes how he created a free taxi service—offering rides in exchange for illuminating conversation—to go beyond the headlines and get to know a wide range of colorful, compelling characters representative of the new China. They include folks like “Beer,” a slippery salesman who tries to sell Langfitt a used car; Rocky, a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer; and Chen, who runs an underground Christian church and moves his family to America in search of a better, freer life.

How Clean Indoor Air Is Becoming China's Latest Luxury Must-Have

Helen Roxburgh
Guardian
One luxury hotel in Shanghai is attracting guests with clean filtered air.

Culture

03.23.18

What Chinese High School Students Learn in America

Jonathan Landreth
In 2011, when a rural prep school in Maine invited New York-based director Miao Wang to screen her first film, Beijing Taxi, she was surprised to find so many Chinese students enrolled at the archetypal New England establishment. Not Chinese-...

China’s Radical Plan to Limit the Populations of Beijing and Shanghai

Helen Roxburgh
Guardian
In the weaving alleys of Shanghai’s Laoximen district, swathes of residential buildings sit empty. The historic area in the heart of the city is being slowly demolished, and many residents have already abandoned it, leaving behind rows of...

More Than a Dozen Hurt as Van Crashes outside Starbucks in Shanghai

Charlie Campbell
Time
At least 18 people were injured after a minivan rammed into pedestrians near a Starbuck’s coffee shop in downtown Shanghai on Friday morning.

Sinica Podcast

09.30.17

‘China in Drag: Travels with a Cross-Dresser’

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
Michael Bristow, the Asia Pacific editor for the BBC World Service, has written a book called China in Drag: Travels with a Cross-Dresser, in which he recounts his time in China—his travels, his reporting, and his myriad experiences—through the...

Blocked in China, Facebook Is Said to Seek a Shanghai Office

Paul Mozur
New York Times
The social media giant in recent months has quietly scouted for office space in Shanghai, according to two people with knowledge of its efforts there. Those offices would house employees working on Facebook’s effort to make hardware but could also...

China to Rev up Bullet Train Revolution with World's Fastest Service on Shanghai-Beijing Line

Sarah Zheng
South China Morning Post
China will soon start official operation of the world’s fastest train service, knocking an hour off the 1,318km journey between Beijing and Shanghai.

China Focus: China’s New High-Speed Train Debuts on Beijing-Shanghai Route

Xinhua
China’s next generation bullet train, “Fuxing,” ran for the first time on the Beijing-Shanghai line on Monday. CR400AF departed Beijing South Station at 11:05 a.m. for Shanghai, while, at exactly the same time, CR400BF left Shanghai Hongqiao Station...

Former State Department Security Officer Accused of Spying for China

Charlie Savage
New York Times
F.B.I. agents found top-secret documents on a device he brought back from Shanghai.

Media

06.21.17

American Universities in China: Free Speech Bastions or Threats to Academic Freedom?

Eric Fish from Asia Blog
In 1986, Johns Hopkins University opened a study center in Nanjing University, making it the first American institution of higher education allowed to establish a physical presence in China during the Communist era. Since then, dozens of other...

Conversation

06.14.17

Do Street Protests Work in China?

Mara Hvistendahl, Benjamin L. Read & more
A rare street protest broke out in China’s biggest city and commercial capital on Saturday night, June 10, when residents of Shanghai marched against new housing rules that some residents claimed have caused the value of their property to plummet...

Hundreds Protest in Shanghai over Ban on Selling Converted Flats

Daniel Ren, Sandy Li
South China Morning Post
Rare demonstration came after city authorities barred owners from selling apartments converted from office or commercial space.

Rare Public Protest in China's Shanghai over Property Rule Change

Andrew Galbraith, Yawen Chen
Reuters
Hundreds of demonstrators have marched through a shopping district in the Chinese city of Shanghai protesting against changes to housing regulations, in a rare show of public dissent in the financial hub.

China’s Clean Energy Ambition Floats on Abandoned Coal Mine

Bloomberg
China’s ambitions to dominate new energy technologies are unfolding at the site of an abandoned coal mine about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northwest of Shanghai.

Airbnb’s Rivals in China Hold Hands in a Nervous New Market

Amie Tsang and Paul Mozur
New York Times
Airbnb sees big promise in China, where travel spending reached nearly $500 billion in 2015 thanks to a new generation of domestic tourists. On Wednesday in Shanghai, Airbnb unveiled a new Chinese name—Aibiying, which means “welcome each other with...

China Steps up Battle against Property Bubble

Gabriel Wildau
Financial Times
Big cities escalate efforts to curb the soaring prices that are stoking anger

The Life of a Football Coach in China

Matt Stanger
Guardian
After impressing in Taiwan and the Philippines, Matt Ward moved to Shanghai Shenxin, where he gained ‘all the experience you need to deal with anything’

Books

11.04.16

Land of Fish and Rice

Fuchsia Dunlop
The lower Yangtze region, or Jiangnan, with its modern capital Shanghai, has been known since ancient times as a “land of fish and rice.” For centuries, local cooks have harvested the bounty of its lakes, rivers, fields, and mountains to create a cuisine renowned for its delicacy and beauty. In Land of Fish and Rice, Fuchsia Dunlop draws on years of study and exploration to present the recipes, techniques, and ingredients of the Jiangnan kitchen. You will be inspired to try classic dishes such as Beggar’s Chicken and sumptuous Dongpo Pork, as well as fresh, simple recipes such as Clear-Steamed Sea Bass and Fresh Soybeans with Pickled Greens. Evocatively written and featuring stunning recipe photography, this is an important new work celebrating one of China’s most fascinating culinary regions. —W.W. Norton{chop}

Shanghai Seeks to Enforce Ban on Overseas Curricula at International Schools

Li Rongde
Move comes as officials voice fears over erosion of values that result from imported syllabuses

Sinica Podcast

07.11.16

The Street of Eternal Happiness

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for Marketplace, has been living in China on and off since 1995. He is the author of Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road, a book about the people living and working on Changle Lu in...

Books

06.15.16

Street of Eternal Happiness

Rob Schmitz
Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance, where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital, ideas, and opportunity. Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood, forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city’s sleek skyline a brighter future and a chance to rewrite their destinies. There’s Zhao, whose path from factory floor to shopkeeper is sidetracked by her desperate measures to ensure a better future for her sons. Down the street lives Auntie Fu, a fervent capitalist forever trying to improve herself with religion and get-rich-quick schemes while keeping her skeptical husband at bay. Up a flight of stairs, musician and café owner CK sets up shop to attract young dreamers like himself, but learns he’s searching for something more. As Schmitz becomes more involved in their lives, he makes surprising discoveries which untangle the complexities of modern China: A mysterious box of letters that serve as a portal to a family’s—and country’s—dark past, and an abandoned neighborhood where fates have been violently altered by unchecked power and greed.A tale of 21st century China, Street of Eternal Happiness profiles China’s distinct generations through multifaceted characters who illuminate an enlightening, humorous, and at times heartrending journey along the winding road to the Chinese Dream. Each story adds another layer of humanity and texture to modern China, a tapestry also woven with Schmitz’s insight as a foreign correspondent. The result is an intimate and surprising portrait that dispenses with the tired stereotypes of a country we think we know, immersing us instead in the vivid stories of the people who make up one of the world’s most captivating cities. —Crown Publishers {chop}

In China, Disney Aims to Keep Security Behind the Scenes

James T. Areddy
Wall Street Journal
With 330 million people only hours away, crowd control is paramount at new Shanghai Disneyland Resort.

Caixin Media

06.03.16

Bearing Witness to the China Story

Sheila Melvin
In 1993, Fritz Hoffmann was a young American photojournalist ready for a new adventure. He had honed his picture-making skills while hitchhiking across the Pacific Northwest, harvesting crabs in Alaska, and working at newspapers in West Virginia and...

Caixin Media

03.23.16

Fall of Shanghai’s Utilities Chief Unravels Web of Corruption

A graft probe into the head of a state-run utilities firm in Shanghai put investigators on the trail of two top local government officials, people with knowledge of the matter say.Feng Jun, the former general manager of State Grid Shanghai Electric...

Green Space

01.22.16

Sea Level Rise In Pictures, Cancer Villages Near Beijing

Michael Zhao
I think a big part of the reason why citizens of the world have not rallied to deal with climate change is the lack of a certain deadline that would warrant our immediate response to the grave consequences of our warming planet. There is no...

Environment

01.11.16

Chinese Cities Most at Risk from Rising Sea Levels

from chinadialogue
A study by Climate Central, a non-profit news organization focusing on climate science, showed that 12 other nations have more than 10 million people living on land that would be destroyed should the earth’s temperature rise to 4 degrees Celsius.As...

China Market Rout Doesn't Reflect Economy, Top Diplomat Says

Bloomberg
“Some movements on the stock exchange in China should not equal the whole picture of the Chinese economy.”

Teaching ABCs of The Birds And The Bees

Zhang Qian
Shanghai Daily
Pupils eagerly participate in a class about sex and gender difference at a school in Shanghai.

China Will close 150 Factories to Make Sure Shanghai Disneyland Has Blue Skies

Steve Mollman
Quartz
What will Disneyland with Chinese characteristics look like?

Media

08.31.15

Netanyahu, Shanghai, and the Communist Party’s Forbidden History

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
On August 26, the Israeli Embassy in China posted a one-minute video to its official account on Weibo, China’s huge microblogging platform, thanking the coastal Chinese city of Shanghai for its role sheltering roughly 20,000 Jews fleeing persecution...

Caixin Media

07.14.15

Uber CEO Enjoying a Fast China Ride

Demand for cross-town transportation is at the heart of an urban lifestyle that is defining modern China. It is also giving the American car-hire service Uber Technologies Inc. an incredible ride.Few are enjoying the ride more than Uber CEO Travis...

Uber Spends Heavily to Establish Itself in China

Paul Mozur and Mike Isaac
New York Times
Fat with almost $6 billion in venture capital, San Francisco-based Uber is doling out bonuses up to three times its fares.

Star Wars to Screen in China for First Time Ever

Time
The Shanghai International Film Festival will screen the original six films.

This American VC Thinks He’s Getting Out of China Just in Time

Bloomberg
The 52-year-old began venture investing in China in 2009 and ended up putting money into 50 startups.

Indians From All Over China Are Flocking to Shanghai to Hear Their Prime Minister Speak

Rishi Iyengar
Time
More than 5,000 Indian expats are expected to attend an event on Saturday.

Books

04.30.15

Fantasy Islands

Julie Sze
The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs involved. Fantasy Islands probes Chinese, European, and American eco-desire and eco-technological dreams, and examines the solutions they offer to environmental degradation in this age of global economic change.Uncovering the stories of sites in China, including the plan for a new eco-city called Dongtan on the island of Chongming, mega-suburbs, and the Shanghai World Expo, Julie Sze explores the flows, fears, and fantasies of Pacific Rim politics that shaped them. She charts how climate change discussions align with U.S. fears of China’s ascendancy and the related demise of the American Century, and she considers the motives of financial and political capital for eco-city and ecological development supported by elite power structures in the U.K. and China. Fantasy Islands shows how ineffectual these efforts are while challenging us to see what a true eco-city would be. —University of California Press{chop}

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.

Sinica Podcast

02.02.15

Shanghai and the Future Now

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
Expats in Beijing may be partial to our rugged smogtropolis, but even the most diehard northerner will admit that Shanghai is the more romantic of the two cities, with its very name conjuring up images of 19th century opium dens, jazz bars in the...

Shanghai-Hong Kong Link to Start in a Week as China Opens

Eduard Gismatullin and Kana Nishizawa
Bloomberg
The program allowing a net 23.5 billion yuan ($3.8 billion) of daily cross-border purchases will begin on November 17, regulators said in a joint statement today after weeks of investor speculation on the start date.

Chinese Directors on Winning Global Box Office: ‘Attacking Hollywood Is the Best Way’

Clifford Coonan
Hollywood Reporter
At the Shanghai Film Festival's most popular forum, leading local film figures debate whether Hollywood is friend or foe.

Elaborate Lattice Work in Confucius Lane

Sue Ann
Shanghai Street Stories
In my few years of photographing old houses around Shanghai, I have never been this buoyant over lattice woodwork in its original setting.

Media

03.01.14

China’s Oscar Challenge

Jonathan Landreth
On January 3, the film critics of The New York Times published their Oscar nominations wish list. Many of their wishes came true and on Sunday night, March 2, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will broadcast its annual celebration of...

Environment

01.21.14

Real-time Air Quality Data Due from 179 Chinese Cities

from chinadialogue
More than 170 cities in China have now joined a real-time air quality disclosure scheme, initiated by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.Launched in 2012, more than sixty cities had started publishing data from their monitoring stations by the...

Caixin Media

01.08.14

How Shanghai’s Free Trade Zone Works

At a conference table surrounded by bookshelves in his Shanghai office, the city’s party boss Han Zheng recently polished the image of a commercial crown jewel—the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone—during an exclusive interview with Caixin.Han...

If You Can't Beat the Shanghai Smog, Change the System

Adam Minter
Bloomberg
As the smog that has choked Shanghai for much of the last week reached hazardous levels, the city’s environmental authority adjusted standards downward to ensure that there won’t be so many frequent  air-quality alerts.

China Is Cheating World Student Rankings

David Stout
Time
The results from a global exam that evaluates students’ reading, science and math skills are in and, once again, Chinese students appear to be reigning supreme while American students continued to underperform.

Culture

11.22.13

A Homecoming

Sun Yunfan & Shen Wei
Shot in big cities and small towns across China in recent years, Shen Wei’s photographic project “Chinese Sentiment” is a personal journey to recapture bygone Chinese life in both private and public space. Born and raised in Shanghai, Shen Wei...

Excerpts

11.22.13

Shen Wei’s ‘Chinese Sentiment’

Peter Hessler
When Shen Wei was growing up in Shanghai during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, his mother worked as a fashion designer who specialized in calendars. If a company wanted to publish one, they hired Shen Wei’s mother, and she designed clothes for...

Media

10.07.13

Just How Free Is Shanghai’s New Free Trade Zone?

This article is adapted, with updates, from the September 20 article “China’s New Free Trade Zone: Silver Bullet or Stopgap Measure?“Two weeks after taking office in March 2013, China’s Premier Li Keqiang announced that Shanghai, the country’s...

Big Reform Plans for China’s Newest Trade Zone Set High Expectations

Pete Sweeney
Reuters
China has formally announced detailed plans for a new free-trade zone in Shanghai, touted as the country’s biggest potential economic reform since Deng Xiaoping used a similar zone in Shenzhen to pry open a closed economy ...

Books of the Times—“Five Star Billionaire”

Dwight Garner
New York Times
Shanghai For Strivers: Tash Aw’s new novel captures China’s changes.

China’s Cordgrass Plan Is ‘Overkill’

Jane Qiu
Nature
The plant in question is Spartina alterniflora, or cordgrass. In 1979, the plant was introduced to China because its roots can trap sediment, making it ideal for erosion control and land reclamation. Since then, the weed has spread rapidly...

Caixin Media

07.01.13

Renewed Growth on the New Third Board

The State Council announced on June 19 that it would expand the New Third Board, an over-the-counter (OTC) market for non-listed companies’ shares, to include all small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) nationwide.One of the experts estimated the...

Caixin Media

04.20.13

Bird Flu’s Latest Talons Force Fresh Defense

A surprise attack by a new strain of the bird flu virus has forced Chinese authorities into the trenches for a two-pronged defense against unseen enemies.The primary threat is the deadly virus that scientists identified as a new strain of H7N9. It...

China Escalates Its Response To Outbreak Of Avian Flu

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
Chinese officials escalated their response, advising people to avoid live poultry, sending virologists to chicken farms across the country and slaughtering more than 20,000 birds at a wholesale market in Shanghai.