Confession and Reconciliation in the Cultural Revolution’s Aftermath

A Conversation with ChinaFile

By Susan Jakes on July 27, 2022

Last week, frequent ChinaFile contributors Geremie Barmé and Zha Jianying joined editor Susan Jakes on Twitter Spaces to discus Zha’s recent short story for ChinaFile, “The Prize Student.” The story takes place in Nanjing in 1983, as a prominent writer pays a visit to a Middle School teacher he had denounced and persecuted at the start of the Cultural Revolution 17 years earlier. Barmé and Zha discussed the story’s origins, their own experience of the Cultural Revolution, and the vexed question of how it is and can be remembered in China today.

Arrests and Charges Related to Hong Kong's National Security Law

on July 5, 2022

Since May 2021, Lydia Wong, Eric Yan-ho Lai, and Thomas Kellogg, from the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University, have tracked the implementation of Hong Kong’s National Security Law, tallying up arrests and prosecutions as well as assessing larger trends in the nature of such cases. In addition to hosting the two articles they have written about their findings (“New Data Show Hong Kong’s National Security Arrests Follow a Pattern” and “Arrest Data Show National Security Law Has Dealt a Hard Blow to Free Expression in Hong Kong”), ChinaFile is providing regularly-updated data about these cases on a stand-alone page: “Tracking the Impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law.” Check back here frequently for information about new arrests or updates to cases working their way through the legal system.

2021 (Most Recent) Official PRC Place Name Data Available for Download

on July 5, 2022

For the last few years, ChinaFile has collected and hosted the list of official names of all the places (political units) in China. This information is openly available on the Chinese government’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) website, but not in an easily downloadable or searchable format. We have compiled these lists in CSV format in the hopes they may be of use to other researchers.

Participation in Xinjiang Surveillance Program Can Lead to Smoother Career Enhancement

By Jessica Batke on July 5, 2022

Since 2014, authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have, as Human Rights Watch phrases it, sent “cadres from government agencies, state-owned enterprises, and public institutions to regularly visit and surveil people.” The program, known as “Visit the People, Benefit the People, Bring Together the Hearts of the People,” is one way the government keeps tabs on Uyghurs and other ethnic minority residents of the region.

A Note on Notes From ChinaFile

on July 5, 2022

As ChinaFile approaches its 10th birthday, we find ourselves occasionally having something on the short side to say. Notes from ChinaFile will provide a dwelling place on our site for recommendations of books or articles, shrewd thoughts we overhear or that you send us, treasures from our archives, short chats with contributors, documents in search of a story, questions, partially formed ideas, clever uses for a scallion, and likely much else that hasn’t yet occurred to us. We’ll keep you posted.