Viewpoint
09.26.14‘The China-U.S. Relationship is Basically Good’
A few days ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for a conference. While there, I met some American friends. We had an interesting discussion about what seems to me to be a debate going on in the U.S. about China-U.S. relations: One side believes the China...
Environment
09.25.14New York Climate Summit Fails to Bridge Rich-Poor Divide
from chinadialogue
India reiterated its need to develop, China listed the steps it was taking and the United States repeated that all countries should control greenhouse-gas emissions.Despite notable advances in many areas, the special climate summit convened by...
Media
09.25.14An Internet Where Nobody Says Anything
Here is what a court in Urumqi, the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, concludes Ilham Tohti, a balding, thick-set, 44-year-old professor, did: “Using ‘Uighur Online’ as a platform, and taking advantage of his role as a university professor...
Viewpoint
09.25.14How Bad Does the Air Pollution Have to Be Before You’d Wear a Face Mask?
“Mommy, why don’t I wear a face mask?” asked my nine-year-old daughter Maggie nearly every day during the first few weeks of school. Two of her expat classmates had been in Beijing less than a year, but it seemed as if they wore theirs all the time...
Culture
09.23.14Contact 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...
Caixin Media
09.22.14Nudging China Toward Governance Reform
Three recent items of news deserve attention. First, revisions to the budget law were passed late last month. Second, in a speech this month marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the National People's Congress, Party General Secretary...
Viewpoint
09.19.14“Daddy’s ‘Friends’ Are Actually Plainclothes Cops”
[Updated March 18, 2015] The essay that follows was written by Zeng Jinyan, whose former partner, Hu Jia, has been prominently involved in activism around environmental issues, AIDS, and human rights in China over the past decade and a half and is a...
Environment
09.19.14Here’s How This Giant Chinese Forest Disappeared
In early August, Greenpeace China’s forest campaigner Wu Hao wrote a piece in the environmental section of the newspaper Southern Weekly about China’s astonishing rate of deforestation. He posted dramatic before and after satellite images of forests...
Media
09.18.14‘What’s So Wrong with Splitting up?’
It reads like an Orwellian threat to all Scots: "The English government needs to immediately commence political thought education, and Scotland needs to be ruled by someone patriotic. Strike hard against separatist forces! Let every department...
Viewpoint
09.18.14More Exploitation, More Happiness
It was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in recent Chinese history. On August 2, a massive metal dust explosion killed 75 workers and injured another 186 at a factory in Kunshan, in Jiangsu province, that supplied wheels to General Motors...
Caixin Media
09.16.14Grappling with Ammonia in China’s Haze
Chicken farmers and auto designers follow different career paths, but soon both may be changing how they do their jobs as part of a campaign to clean up China's polluted air.Emissions from poultry waste and auto engines alike can contain...
Media
09.12.14A 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...
Viewpoint
09.10.14China’s Tough New Internet Rules Explained
On August 7, the State Internet Information Office issued a new set of guidelines entitled “Provisional Regulations for the Development and Management of Instant Messaging Tools and Public Information Services.” These regulations require that...
Environment
09.10.14The Dark Side of the Boom
from chinadialogue
Just over a year ago, in July 2013, a report published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put the health impacts of air pollution in China into an unusually clear framework: residents of south China, the report said...
Media
09.10.14iPhone 6: Designed in California, Leaked in China
China’s cyberspace is bursting with anticipation for the iPhone 6—never mind that it promises to cost more than most citizens make in a month. Apple, the U.S.-based company that designs and sells the iPhone, had scheduled a major announcement about...
Caixin Media
09.08.14Gaokao, China’s National College Exam, to Carry Less Weight
The Ministry of Education announced reforms on September 4 that will lessen the weight that the gaokao, the country's national college entrance exam, carries for university enrollment. The changes are to come into effect by 2020.The...
Culture
09.04.14‘Transformers 4’ May Pander to China, But America Still Wins
Hollywood made news this summer with the China triumph of Transformers: Age of Extinction, which broke all previous Chinese box office records. The Chinese box office even outsold the North American box office. But jubilation over the film’s...
Environment
09.04.14Alibaba Founder Shoots Himself in the Foot with UK Hunting Trip
from chinadialogue
Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce platform Alibaba and chairman of The Nature Conservancy’s China Program, has drawn hostile fire from environmentalists after a British newspaper recently reported he hunted stags in Scotland in 2012. What’s more, Ma...
Caixin Media
09.03.14Beijing Must Address Claims of Anti-Foreign Bias
Once mocked as a “toothless tiger,” China’s anti-monopoly law is finally demonstrating some bite, six years after it took effect.The three agencies responsible for enforcing it—the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of...
Viewpoint
09.02.14The Danger of China’s ‘Chosen Trauma’
When we see young Chinese people at a state event collectively chant, “Do not forget national humiliation and realize the Chinese dream!” we may be tempted to dismiss it as yet another piece of CCP propaganda. But we may also find ourselves...
Media
09.02.14Anti-Vice Click-Bait Spawns Popular Govt. Social Media Feed
The Chinese government institution with the biggest social media following goes to...the nationwide anti-vice campaign called "Strike the four blacks, Eliminate the four harms." Da Sihei, Chu Sihai in Mandarin, the four blacks and four...
Viewpoint
08.28.14China’s Nicaraguan Canal
While Nicaragua was once a central concern—indeed, almost an obsession—of Washington, as Sandinistas and Contras seemed to be battling for the soul of the Western Hemisphere, in more recent times our small and quite impoverished country has slipped...
Media
08.27.14A ‘School Bus and a Ferrari’
Communication between China and the United States can often resemble ships passing in the night—or planes passing through international airspace. But when it comes to this particularly fraught bilateral relationship, perhaps metaphors are best...
Culture
08.27.14Standing Up for Indie Film in China
In July, Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth in the action-packed series of Hollywood films about trucks turning into giant robots to save the world, became the first film to sell more than $300 million in tickets at China’s box office...
Culture
08.26.14Healthy Words
In 1902, Lu Xun translated Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon into Chinese from the Japanese edition. Science fiction, he wrote in the preface, was “as rare as unicorn horns, which shows in a way the intellectual poverty of our time.” Not any...
Caixin Media
08.25.14His Start in Oil Fuelled Zhou’s Rise to Top Cop
Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party's supreme decision-making body, has been the highest ranking Party cadre to be a target of a corruption investigation.The Party's graft fighters...
Environment
08.21.14Who Will Feed China’s Pigs?
from chinadialogue
He's been called China’s richest chicken farmer, but Liu Yonghao has come a long way from his days breeding birds in rural Sichuan province.As the billionaire founder of the New Hope Group, China’s largest producer of animal feed, Liu’s rise...
Caixin Media
08.19.14A Chinese Town’s Imported Cambodian Brides
It is a hot and sticky midsummer day in a small village along the Chang River in the eastern province of Jiangxi. The most popular spot is in front of the local grocery where a few women are playing mahjong as children chase each other around...
Features
08.14.14Making It in China and the U.S.
Emily Parker is a creator of Green Electronics: A U.S.-China Maker Challenge. The Green Electronics Challenge was an unprecedented collaboration between the New America Foundation, Arizona State University, Slate Magazine, China’s Tsinghua...
Environment
08.13.14Can a Pollution-Tracking App Kickstart Transparency?
from chinadialogue
It seems counter-intuitive that publicly available data needs grassroots activists to make it accessible. Yet, in a sea of regulations and information, official environmental information can be difficult to parse.The risk of information overload...
Environment
08.12.14China Grows An Interest in Organic Foods
Late last month, news broke that a major Chinese supplier of American fast food brands was peddling meat that violated food safety standards.How do such scandals affect the way people in China feed themselves and their families? Chang Tianle, a...
Caixin Media
08.12.14How Tianjin’s Top Cop Built Web of Corruption Over 40 Years
The fall of the public security chief, Wu Changshun, of the northern port city of Tianjin has rocked the local public security system and shed light on the graft network cultivated by Wu over 40 years.The Central Discipline Inspection Commission (...
Culture
08.11.14The Bard in Beijing
At the end of a rollicking production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—directed by Tim Robbins and staged in China in June by the Los Angeles-based Actors’ Gang—the director and actors returned to the stage for a dialogue with the...
Environment
08.07.14What to Do About China’s Polluted Farmland?
While the extent of China's soil pollution crisis is becoming clearer, the consensus on what to do next is still lacking.The results of the state soil survey earlier this year were damning: 16.1% of sampling points nationwide were in breach of...
Media
08.07.14Beards and Muslim Headscarves Banned From Buses In One Xinjiang City
A city in China’s remote western Xinjiang region has temporarily banned men with beards and women with Muslim headscarves from taking public buses. The extreme security measure—to be implemented for the duration of a sports competition slated to...
Media
08.06.14The Bizarre Fixation on a 23-Year-Old Woman
On August 4, a 6.5-magnitude earthquake viciously struck Ludian County, a township in the southwest province of Yunnan, with a death toll surpassing 400. The news swiftly hit Chinese headlines, and images of the devastation circulated widely on...
Viewpoint
08.05.14Equal in Inequality?
For the past several months, readers around the world have been buying, discussing, and even occasionally reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty’s magisterial analysis of the relationship between capitalist...
Caixin Media
08.05.14Top One Percent Has One-Third of China’s Wealth
A recent academic report on wealth inequality in China shows that the top one percent of households holds one-third of total assets, while the bottom fourth holds only one percent.The report, published by a research institute in Peking University,...
Caixin Media
07.31.14Ex-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
07.30.14Paper 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
07.30.14Say 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...
Environment
07.23.14Moving a Mountain, of Trash
from chinadialogue
On July 1, tough new standards for pollution from waste incinerators came into effect. The move is an attempt to end the conflict between communities across China and the nearby rubbish-burning plants they believe threaten their health and house...
Caixin Media
07.22.14Stability the Watchword for Progress in China
Chinese diplomacy has had a busy few months, with numerous visits abroad by leaders and a constant stream of foreign leaders coming to the country.Amid the flurry of activity, two meetings were particularly noteworthy: the sixth U.S.-China Strategic...
Media
07.22.14All Hail ‘Fatty Kim the Third’
It’s North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un as the world has never seen him. In a three-minute clip that has accumulated over 200,000 views after its early July posting on Chinese video site Tudou, a crudely photoshopped Kim dances on the street,...
Media
07.21.14Everybody Hates Rui
He may be widely reviled in his home country, but oh, what a resume: The son of an author and screenwriter; a graduate of the prestigious China Foreign Affairs University; a Yale World Fellow; and state-run China Central Television (CCTV)’s best-...
Environment
07.17.14The Legacy of Hunan’s Polluted Soils
from chinadialogue
This is the second of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360 with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts one and three.Cao Fushe spent much of 2013...
Environment
07.17.14China Faces Long Battle to Clean Polluted Soil
from chinadialogue
This is the third of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360 with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts one and two.Luo Jinzhi is 52 and lives in...
Caixin Media
07.15.14Silencing a Health Reformer’s Voice
Dr. Liao Xinbo is struggling to square his enormous popularity and thirst for healthcare reform with a recent demotion that, in his words, marked the culmination of his frustrated work life.Liao served as Deputy Director of the Guangdong Province...
Environment
07.10.14U.S.-China Climate Cooperation More Crucial Than Ever
from chinadialogue
As the governments of the United States and China meet in Beijing this week for the Sixth U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), one area worth watching closely is clean energy and climate change cooperation. While this topic may...
Media
07.08.14Changing the Chinese Embassy’s Address to Liu Xiaobo Plaza Is a Silly Idea
I rarely agree with the Chinese Embassy in Washington, but an amendment making its way through Congress has made me unlikely bedfellows with Beijing’s Washington diplomats.Representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.) has sponsored an amendment to rename the...
Caixin Media
07.08.14Hard Choices for Family Planners and Parents
The technocrats in charge of China's one-child policy have the power to force sterilizations, abortions, and intra-uterine device (IUD) implants, as well as punish uncooperative parents by denying them jobs, denying their children schooling,...
Environment
07.03.14The Victims of China’s Soil Pollution Crisis
from chinadialogue
This is the first of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts two and three.When Zhang Junwei’s uncle died...
Media
07.02.14The Mogul Takes Manhattan
Lunch at Central Park's Loeb Boathouse is an elegant affair, popular among well-heeled tourists and alumni networking associations for its lakeside view and excellent service. But on Wednesday, June 25, the restaurant hosted hundreds of...
Culture
07.01.14Inside the Mind of a Chinese Hacker
In May, the U.S. announced the indictment of five Chinese hackers for breaking into the computers of U.S. companies. The men went by code names like UglyGorilla and KandyGoo. A recent report revealed that the hackers, who worked for Unit 61398 of...
Caixin Media
07.01.14China Pulling the Plug on Foreign Mainframes
E-commerce companies and banks in China are scrapping hardware and uninstalling software for mainframe servers made by American suppliers in favor of homegrown brands said to be safe, advanced, and a lot less expensive.The movement has taken special...
Environment
06.27.14Germany’s Renewables Paradox a Warning Sign for China
from chinadialogue
From the hay field behind his house, Gunter Jurischka points out the solar panels glittering from the town’s rooftops and the towering wind turbines spinning lazily on the horizon.Thanks to Germany’s now famous Energiewende (or “energy transition”)...
Caixin Media
06.24.14Top Political Advisor Investigated for Graft
A vice chairman of the country's top political advisory body is being investigated for "serious violations of discipline," the Communist Party's anti-graft fighter says.The Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) did not...
Media
06.24.14The President China Never Had
An activist lawyer heroically risks everything for his beliefs. Although he fails, his brave stand against authoritarianism wins him lasting admiration and changes the fate of his East Asian nation forever. The plot may sound seditious in mainland...
Environment
06.19.14What China Should Say at the U.N. Climate Change Summit
from chinadialogue
With a little more than 100 days to go, countries are gearing up for Ban Ki-moon’s New York climate summit, the first climate convention of world leaders since Copenhagen and a meeting that aims to catalyze new commitments and mobilize political...
Caixin Media
06.18.14China’s Retiring Migrant Workers Have No Place to Call Home
A generation of Chinese people from rural areas who moved to the big cities to find work is reaching retirement age, but many are finding they have been left outside the country's urban pension system despite extensive reforms in recent years...