Caixin Media
04.01.14Eviction by Arson: Land-Seizure Turns Deadly
A village head and the boss of a building company were among the seven people arrested over an arson attack on a protest against a land seizure in Shandong Province in which one man died and three others were hurt.The government of Pingdu, a county...
Media
03.28.14Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou Talk Movies
Ang Lee, the Oscar-winning American film director with Taiwan roots, and Zhang Yimou, the storied veteran of mainland Chinese moviemaking, joined together on March 27 at Cooper Union in New York in a discussion billed “Chinese Film, Chinese...
Environment
03.27.14Climate Change Darkens Life in China
from chinadialogue
Asia faces a worsening water crisis, according to a leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Water demand from rising populations and living standards, and poor management—in addition to climate change—will increase...
Media
03.26.14A Wrinkle to Those Hot Chinese Tech IPOs
Investors, ready your wallets. In the past week, Sina Weibo, China’s massive microblogging platform with 280 million users, and Alibaba, the operator of China’s largest online marketplace which generated $1.84 billion in revenue in the fourth...
Media
03.25.14China, We Fear You
On March 18, thousands of students began a sit-in of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan in the capital, Taipei, a historic first that has paralyzed the island’s lawmaking body. Students have amassed to protest an attempt by the Kuomintang, the island’s...
Caixin Media
03.25.14State-Owned Oil Firms Invite Outside Investors
Since February, state-owned oil majors have taken steps toward pilots in mixed-share ownership, following central government calls for reforms to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). After the Chinese New Year, China Petroleum and Chemical...
Media
03.21.14“We’ll Know It When We’re There”
Martin Johnson (not his real name), is a co-founder of the China-based Internet freedom advocacy collective GreatFire.org. On the condition that he not be photographed, he gave the following interview to ChinaFile at an outdoor cafe in Manhattan...
Features
03.21.14Punching a Hole in the Great Firewall
In January, when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published its exposé of the use of offshore tax havens by Chinese politicians and business moguls, the Chinese government blocked access to the consortium’s website and to...
Environment
03.19.14Is China Underfunding its ‘War on Pollution’?
from chinadialogue
China’s environmental spending showed a year-on-year drop of almost ten percent in 2013, according to the budget report delivered at China’s annual parliamentary gathering.Despite premier Li Keqiang’s vow to declare “war on pollution”, the 2013...
Caixin Media
03.18.14How Xinjiang Real Estate Takes Its Shape
Police nabbed property developer Zhao Xingru and detained her for more than thirty days in late 2012 and early 2013 based on fraud allegations filed by executives at one of the country's largest developers, Hangzhou-based Greentown China Group...
Media
03.17.14‘Self-Media’ Pushes and Beijing Pushes Back
Michelle Song, twenty-four, studies international relations at Beijing’s prestigious Peking University and lives in a dormitory, so she doesn’t watch television regularly and doesn’t subscribe to newspapers. But this has not hampered her ability to...
Media
03.14.14The Other Shoe Drops
Welcome to the big leagues, WeChat.For the past year, the mobile chat app WeChat, or Weixinin Chinese, has been the fresh new face in China’s hyperactive social media, stealing millions of members—not to mention mojo—from its wounded but still...
Viewpoint
03.13.14How Chinese Internet Censorship Works, Sometimes
Earlier this week, Chinese Internet services blocked searches for the phrase mìshū bāng (秘书帮). Roughly translated as “secretaries gang,” the term relates to the speculation surrounding government probes into public officials linked to former...
Environment
03.11.14It’s Time to Cooperate on the Yarlung Tsangpo
from chinadialogue
This is part of a special series of articles produced by thethirdpole.net on the future of the Yarlung Tsangpo river—one of the world’s great transboundary rivers—which starts on the Tibetan Plateau before passing through India and Bangladesh.The...
Caixin Media
03.11.14Li Ka-shing’s Remedy for ‘Coddled’ Hong Kong
Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing is again in the media spotlight after he mentioned in late February the possibility of publicly listing his retail business A.S. Watson Group, which is part of the Hong Kong-listed conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa."No...
Media
03.07.14A Map of China, By Stereotype
Why is the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang “so chaotic”? Why are many from the southern metropolis of Shanghai “unfit to lead”? And do people from central Henan Province really steal manhole covers? These are just some of the questions—...
Viewpoint
03.06.14Can America Win in a New Era of Competition with China?
Beijing was in a state of heightened anxiety and had been for weeks. Each day in the run-up to the National Day parade, the security measures seemed to get a little bit tighter. Our apartment building had a distant view of Jianguomen, which is the...
Environment
03.05.14Should China Follow in America’s Factory Farming Footsteps?
from chinadialogue
The scale of growth in China’s meat production over the past three decades is staggering. Today, one-third of the world’s meat is produced in the country and half of all pigs live there. While per capita consumption may still be below the U.S. and...
Caixin Media
03.04.14Henan Villagers Seek Justice in Hepatitis C Scandal
Villagers from a county in the central province of Henan say they are still seeking justice almost two years after a doctor admitted reusing syringes and nearly 1,000 people were found to have hepatitis C.The scandal, which has received little...
Caixin Media
03.03.14Kunming Attack Is ‘China’s 9/11,’ State Media Says
In the days after a major terror attack in Kunming, state media outlets are calling for a united front to combat terror and warning against excusing the attackers or criticizing the government’s policies on minorities.On the evening of March 1, a...
Media
03.03.14‘Enemies of Humanity’ — China Debates Who’s to Blame For the Kunming Attack
It’s already being called “3.01,” or “three oh one,” a date that will likely burn in China’s collective memory for years to come. According to Xinhua, China’s state news agency, on the evening of March 1, around 9:00 p.m. Beijing time, ten or more...
Media
03.01.14China’s Oscar Challenge
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
02.28.14Citizen Sues Local Government for Failing to Curb Air Pollution
from chinadialogue
Although residents in Northern China are no strangers to dirty air, a man from the smog-enshrouded Hebei province has decided to take the local environmental authority to court for failing to control air pollution.Li Guixin, a resident in Hebei’s...
Viewpoint
02.27.14Why Frank Underwood is Great for China’s Soft Power
In depicting U.S. politics as just as vicious, if not more, sociopathic than its Chinese counterpart, House of Cards delivered a sweet Valentine’s Day gift to the Chinese government. The show handed the Chinese state an instant victory when the...
Environment
02.26.14South-North Water Transfer ‘Not Sustainable,’ Official Says
from chinadialogue
The $62 billion South-North Water Transfer Project would be rendered irrelevant if one-third of buildings in Beijing could collect more rainwater and recycle more wastewater, according to a Chinese ministerial official. The remarks made by Qiu...
Media
02.26.14China, LinkedIn Would Like to Add You to Its Network
LinkedIn is now aiming its bow for the rocky shoals that have claimed Facebook, Twitter, Google, and even eBay: the Chinese market. On February 24, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner announced the launch of LinkedIn’s Chinese-language site, still in beta,...
Caixin Media
02.25.14Sichuan Tycoon Charged with Murder Linked to Ex-Top Security Czar’s Son
A Sichuan tycoon who has been charged with a host of gang-related crimes, including murder, was a close business partner of a former top leader’s son, himself caught in a corruption inquiry.Prosecutors say Sichuan Hanlong Group chairman Liu Han, his...
Media
02.21.14How the Internet and Social Media Are Transforming China
“The Internet has radically transformed China,” said Emily Parker, author of the book Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, in a public discussion at Asia Society in New York on February 19.Talking about the Internet’...
Culture
02.21.14Stranger Than Fiction
In the short twenty years since Yu Hua, a fifty-three-year-old former dentist, has been writing, China has undergone change enough for many lifetimes. His country’s transformations and what they leave in their wake have become the central theme of...
Environment
02.20.14Pollution Tax Suggested for Wealthy Chinese Fleeing for Greener Pastures
from chinadialogue
Environmental problems have become an important factor causing the rich to leave China—but one academic has now suggested that they should first pay an environmental levy. Chen Guoen, a professor at Wuhan University, said that some Western...
Environment
02.19.14Water Pollution: More Difficult to Fix Than Dirty Air?
from chinadialogue
Although China’s air pollution keeps making headlines, its water pollution is just as urgent a problem. One-fifth of the country’s rivers are toxic, while two-fifths are classified as seriously polluted. In 2012, more than half of China’s cities had...
Media
02.19.14Chinese Netizens (Still) Love ‘House of Cards’
“Everyone in China who works on this level pays who they need to pay.” Mild spoiler alert: These are the words of the fictitious Xander Feng, an influential Chinese billionaire on the Netflix series "House of Cards," a show that follows...
Caixin Media
02.18.14Lee Hsien Loong on What Singapore Can—and Can’t—Teach China
As one of the Four Asian Tigers, Singapore is known for its strong economy and orderly society. The city-state, with its population of 5.3 million people, is listed by the World Bank as fourth in the world in terms of per capita income. As a...
Features
02.14.14It’s Hard to Say ‘I Love You’ in Chinese
“We didn’t say ‘I love you,’” said Dr. Kaiping Peng, Associate Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. I’d ventured over to his China office on the campus of Beijing’s mighty Tsinghua University to talk to him...
Media
02.14.14A Kapital Idea
Matthew Neiderhauser is a photographer and artist whose work is influenced by his studies in anthropology. He lived in Beijing for six years and recently returned to the United States. His pictorial book Sound Kapital, published in 2009, documented...
Media
02.13.14Did President Xi’s Dumpling Outing Create a Pilgrimage Site?
Beijing, China—It’s well after lunch and Liu Fengju still hasn’t gotten her food. The sixty-seven-year-old wife of a retired railway worker came to Beijing to spend Spring Festival, the annual seven-day Chinese New Year celebration, with her niece...
Environment
02.12.14China Unlikely to Reduce Coal Use in the Next Decade
from chinadialogue
Coal will account for no less than sixty percent of China’s total energy use in the next decade, said Zheng Xinye, an energy economist at Renmin University. Currently, coal accounts for seventy percent of China’s total energy consumption. The...
Caixin Media
02.11.14Local Governments Aim for Lower GDP Growth This Year
Most of the local governments that have announced their GDP targets for this year aimed lower than they did in 2013, citing the need to rebalance the economy and improve the quality of growth. Many missed their growth targets last year.The...
Culture
02.10.14Will Xi Jinping Stop the Music?
In late November of 2013, I sat chatting in a California concert hall with one of the PRC’s most famous first-generation pianists. Normally at this time of year, the pianist told me, he would be heading off to China to perform multiple New Year’s...
Media
02.07.14Why Chinese Media Is Going Soft on Sochi
Ready or not, Putingrad (aka Sochi) is now on prime time. The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics will take place in the subtropical Russian resort town on February 7. In the Twittersphere, Western journalists and visitors have assailed Sochi’s...
Media
02.06.14Beijing’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...
Environment
02.05.14China’s Future Energy Security Will Depend on Water
from chinadialogue
When we think about water use we think about the water we drink, but we also need water to grow food, generate electricity, make our clothes, and extract minerals. In short, water drives the economy. In China, ninety-seven percent of electricity...
Viewpoint
02.04.14In Slickness and in Wealth
Under the harsh glare of a studio spotlight, bride-to-be Tong turns her face until it is almost completely in shadow. Tong is posing for a three-day session of wedding photographs at Shanghai’s premier Princess Studio, where couples spend between 3,...
Media
02.03.14‘Chicken Fart Decade’: GDP Vs. Smog
Chinese media have debated why January saw pollution so extreme it closed schools and airports, chased away foreign tourists, and even prompted a ban on Lunar New Year’s fireworks. It’s likely that a substantial portion of this smog is caused by...
Environment
01.31.14Beijing Passes Law to Curb Air Pollution
from chinadialogue
China’s first legally binding regulations for reducing PM2.5 levels have been approved by Beijing’s municipal congress.Beijing’s annual average PM2.5 level currently stands at 89.5 micrograms per cubic meter, far exceeding the 35-micrograms national...
Media
01.31.14Closing Time? China’s Social Media Crackdown Has Hit Weibo Hard
Findings by East China Normal University (ECNU), a research university in Shanghai, commissioned by respected U.K. outlet The Telegraph and released January 30, lodges concrete data behind what frequent users and analysts of Chinese social media...
Environment
01.30.14This Chinese Filmmaker Can’t Stop Talking Trash
Documentary filmmaker and photographer Wang Jiuliang spent four years, between 2008 and 2011, documenting over 460 hazardous and mostly illegal landfill sites around Beijing.His award-winning film Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011) provoked intense...
Environment
01.29.14Banned Toxins Found in Kids’ Clothes Made in China
from chinadialogue
Toxic chemicals have been found in children’s clothes sold by Burberry, Adidas, Disney, and nine other brands, according to a report published by the campaign group Greenpeace. These chemicals can be ingested via hand-to-mouth contact, and then...
Media
01.28.14Why China’s Li Na Won’t Thank Her Homeland
After winning the Australian Open on January 25, Li Na set off a media blitz in her native China, where the thirty-one-year-old tennis star made the front page of most major papers. Much discussion surrounded Li’s post-victory speech, where she once...
Caixin Media
01.27.14Time for Overhaul of China’s Land Market
The expected launch of land reform is dividing opinions. At a work meeting this month, the Minister of Land and Resources, Jiang Daming, said the central government would limit land supply in cities with more than five million residents. His words...
Features
01.26.14For Freedom, Justice, and Love
from China Change
Following is legal activist Xu Zhiyong’s closing statement at the end of his trial in Beijing on January 22, 2014. According to his lawyer, Xu was only able to read “about ten minutes of it before the presiding judge stopped him, saying it was...
Media
01.23.14Carpe Coin: Crowdfunding Could Change Chinese Politics
Crowdfunding, which allows web users to contribute small sums of money to fund collective projects like concerts and films, is taking off in China—and just how far it will go is more than a business question. By allowing netizens to vote with their...
Media
01.23.14Out of the Dark Room
Photographers document China’s breakneck development in fractions of a second every single day. Yet the work of Chinese photojournalists remains largely unseen outside their homeland. Of the thousands of images of the country illustrating the pages...
Caixin Media
01.21.14How a PLA General Built a Web of Corruption to Amass a Fortune
More than twenty policemen lined up at the gate of a massive mansion in a village in the central province of Henan at midnight on January 12, 2013, loading heavy crates onto two military trucks.Hours later—loaded with twenty crates of expensive...
Environment
01.21.14Real-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...
Media
01.17.14You’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...
Environment
01.15.14Why Low-Carbon Innovation Matters
from chinadialogue
It came as little surprise when Beijing’s environmental authorities reported in early January last year that the capital’s levels of PM2.5 (a measure of air pollution) were more than double the national standard. The past year saw no end to the smog...
Viewpoint
01.14.14Xi, 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...
Caixin Media
01.13.14Leading the Battle for Reform
The turn of the year brought news that President Xi Jinping will take the helm of the new leading group for overall reform.This group is a key part of China’s reform drive. As soon as its formation was announced at the Third Plenum of the Communist...