Notes from ChinaFile
01.06.23The Class of ’77
In August 1971, Jaime FlorCruz arrived in Beijing for a short trip to learn about Maoist China. Just days later, the Filipino college student learned he had been put on a blacklist by then President Ferdinand Marcos. Facing certain arrest and likely...
Notes from ChinaFile
12.13.22Planting the Flag in Mosques and Monasteries
Over the last few years, the Chinese Communist Party has physically remade places of religious worship in western China to its liking. This includes not only the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but also other areas with mosques or Tibetan...
Viewpoint
12.12.22In China’s Diaspora, Visions of a Different Homeland
At the beginning, there were songs. It’s the Monday after Thanksgiving. In the storied New England town, over a hundred of us had gathered for the candlelight vigil. After a fire claimed at least ten lives in a locked-down building in Urumchi, and...
Media
11.07.22ChinaFile Presents: Nury Turkel, No Escape
In his recent book, No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs, attorney and activist Nury Turkel tells his personal story—his birth in a re-education camp in China, his journey to the United States, and his career working to end...
Notes from ChinaFile
11.07.22China’s Next Act
While discussions of U.S.-China relations tend to revolve around trade and national security, more focus ought to be given to issues of environmental sustainability, including health, and to emerging technology, argues the University of Pennsylvania...
Notes from ChinaFile
11.04.22For Your Weekend, November 4, 2022
Asian Labour Review published a translated first-hand account of one of the many workers who fled a Foxconn factory in Henan this week due to COVID cases and the threat of lockdown. The worker recounts the sudden chaos of leaving, the kindness of...
Viewpoint
11.01.22In Tibet, Officials’ Pursuit of Zero-COVID Sent Tens of Thousands into Mass ‘Isolation’ Facilities
The general attitude in Lhasa since early September has been marked by concern and discontent. Its focus has been primarily on the mass transfer by city officials of thousands of citizens to isolation camps, and on the ways in which officials have...
Notes from ChinaFile
10.28.22For Your Weekend, October 28, 2022
For those interested in the nuts and bolts of Party priorities and self-representation, the Substack Ginger River has provided a line-by-line review of changes in the Party constitution following the recent Party Congress. It has also collected a...
Notes from ChinaFile
10.13.22How to Become a Better Firefighter in Gansu? Read ‘1984,’ ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’ and ‘The Complete Book of Jewish Wisdom’
On April 23, 2022, the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) marked World Book Day with a meeting in Beijing to “study and implement the important instructions of Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and...
Notes from ChinaFile
10.07.22For Your Weekend, October 7, 2022
An article from Emily Feng at NPR, “A public payphone in China began ringing and ringing. Who was calling?,” manages to be both inspiring and deflating. The story it tells brings together themes of environmental justice, public protest, art as a...
Viewpoint
10.03.22Thanks to a County in Utah, Same-Sex Couples Can Get Married—In China
When Juying attended her son Yangming’s wedding this summer, she was not in a banquet hall or a church but in her apartment. On Zoom, she watched Yangming—3,000 kilometers away in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou—stand next to his husband-to-be...
Features
09.29.22Elections? No Thank You. Performance Reviews? Maybe.
In recent years, both Chinese state and Communist Party organizations have fielded thousands of public opinion polls, on subjects ranging from hospital services, to rural revitalization, to food safety. Yet, much of the information gleaned from...
Viewpoint
09.16.22New Export Controls on Chinese Semiconductors May Prove Self-Defeating
New restrictions are not only likely unnecessary, they may ultimately prove self-defeating. Overly zealous controls that limit older semiconductor equipment sales to China will inflict collateral damage on American, and potentially international,...
Media
09.15.22ChinaFile Presents: Surveillance State—Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control
Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin discussed their new book with ChinaFile Senior Editor Jessica Batke and Arthur Ross Director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell. Surveillance State: Inside China’s...
Culture
09.12.22Forbidden Writer
from Mekong Review
From his humble beginnings as a propaganda writer, Yan Lianke has gone on to become among China’s most controversial writers—one whose work is frequently censored for its focus on the lives of those devastated by Beijing’s policies. “When people are...
Notes from ChinaFile
09.09.22For Your Weekend, September 9, 2022
Sixth Tone recently published a striking photo series featuring people in the city of Xi’an who have taken up residence in a half-finished apartment complex. In a story repeated throughout China right now, the developer ceased building due to...
Notes from ChinaFile
09.09.22Online Posts Purport to Show Severe Lockdown Conditions in Xinjiang
Videos, voice messages, and WeChat posts purporting to show residents in the Ghulja (Yining), Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, area of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region crying out for food or medical attention have appeared online in recent...
Notes from ChinaFile
09.01.22For Your Weekend, September 1, 2022
As we go into the last weekend of the summer, and a holiday weekend for those in the U.S., we recommend this New Yorker essay in which Han Zhang discusses the censorship of feminists and reporting on incidents of gender-based violence.
Notes from ChinaFile
08.25.22For Your Weekend, August 25, 2022
This weekend, we recommend this superb exploration of Chinese documentary film winning awards at fake documentary film festivals, from our friends at China Media Project.In this short interview, climate expert (and our Asia Society colleague) Thom...
Culture
08.15.22Hong Kong Type
from Mekong Review
Over the past few years, readers, writers, and publishers in Hong Kong have become interested in the city’s history. New books about colonial figures, societal events, and relics not covered in textbooks have proliferated, dominating independent...
Notes from ChinaFile
08.10.22For Your Weekend, August 11, 2022
The most recent episode of the Sinica Podcast, with former U.S. intelligence officer John Culver, was recorded last week before Beijing’s military exercises in the wake of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. But it’s an invaluable resource on both the...
Notes from ChinaFile
08.04.22For Your Weekend, August 5, 2022
Thanks to our colleagues at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, we are reading this excellent investigation into the effects Chinese iron mining in Guinea, by Bloomberg’s Sheridan Prasso and featuring the work of our old friend,...
Features
08.04.22In What Purport to be Lifestyle Videos, Uyghur Influencers Promote Beijing’s Narrative on Their Homeland
For the past few years, Uyghur and other young members of ethnic minority groups from Xinjiang have been creating videos like Anniguli’s in which they appear to display details of their personal lives while simultaneously evincing support for the...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.28.22For Your Weekend, July 28, 2022
For your weekend, we recommend Ian Johnson’s review of a new English language translation of Wang Xiaobo’s 1992 novella The Golden Age, released this week.You can read more on Wang, his unique place among contemporary Chinese writers, and...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.27.22Confession and Reconciliation in the Cultural Revolution’s Aftermath
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...
Postcard
07.25.22Norma in Kaohsiung
On a warm evening this past January, a crowd gathered outside the Weiwuying Opera House in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, more than an hour before the night’s performance was scheduled to begin. As they waited to enter the theater, people...
Viewpoint
07.21.22From My Anguished Heart—A Letter to My Daughter
In early July 2020, Xu Zhangrun was detained for supposedly having “solicited prostitutes” during a trip with friends to Sichuan in late 2019. He was being persecuted for his unsparing critiques of Xi Jinping, starting in July 2018. The following...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.22Arrests and Charges Related to Hong Kong's National Security Law
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...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.222021 (Most Recent) Official PRC Place Name Data Available for Download
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...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.22Participation in Xinjiang Surveillance Program Can Lead to Smoother Career Enhancement
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,...
Notes from ChinaFile
07.05.22A Note on Notes From ChinaFile
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...
Features
06.03.22The Prize Student
This short story, written in 2000 by Zha Jianying, is ChinaFile’s second foray into original fiction.
Features
05.24.22Public Security Minister’s Speech Describes Xi Jinping’s Direction of Mass Detentions in Xinjiang
An internal Chinese government document provides new support for the extraordinary scale of internment during what was likely its peak in 2018 and 2019. The document, a transcript of an internal June 15, 2018 speech by Minister of Public Security...
Viewpoint
04.08.22Closing the U.S. to Chinese Biotech Would Do Far More Harm Than Good
Biotechnology intrinsically blurs boundaries between science and commerce, market and state, the global and the national, and even personal privacy and collective interest. Progress depends more heavily in biotech than in other high-tech industries...
Features
04.05.22Arrest Data Show National Security Law Has Dealt a Hard Blow to Free Expression in Hong Kong
On December 29, 2021, two hundred national security police officers raided a newspaper headquarters and arrested several individuals at various locations across Hong Kong. The exceptional number of police officers involved suggested those arrested...
Viewpoint
03.21.22‘I’ve Forgotten How to Kneel in Front of You!’
It started with a simple message to his parents. Russian forces were invading Ukraine and, in case something happened to him, Wang Jixian, a computer programmer based in Odessa, decided he had better record a few words addressed to his parents on...
Viewpoint
03.12.22Wang Jixian: A Voice from The Other China, but in Odessa
“Hello, everyone. This is Jixian in Odessa. Just checking in to let you know that I’m okay; I’m still alive.” This is the way that Wang Jixian, a 37-year-old software engineer originally from Beijing, starts most of his daily vlog updates posted...
Viewpoint
02.28.22In Xinjiang’s Tech Incubators, Innovation Is Inseparable from Repression
Innovation and its benefits to society in Xinjiang have come to encompass both the use of big data to enhance cross-border trade and the use of big data to monitor people inside their own homes. Official documents promoting innovation in Xinjiang...
Viewpoint
02.03.22Keeping the Flies Out
from Mekong Review
The first time I rode a public bus in China, in 1985, a young woman came up to me and ran her hand up and down my arm to feel the body hair. Foreigners were like rare animals then: precious, strange, probably dangerous. Surveillance was constant and...
Viewpoint
02.01.22Verdicts from China’s Courts Used to Be Accessible Online. Now They’re Disappearing.
Judicial transparency in China has taken a significant step backward in recent months. Beginning at least a year ago, China’s Supreme People’s Court has considerably scaled back the number of cases available on its China Judgments Online web portal...
Features
01.31.22A Vast Network of ‘New Era Civilization Practice Centers’ Is Beijing’s Latest Bid to Reclaim Hearts and Minds
New Era Civilization Practice Centers are designed to deliver a mix of social services and political indoctrination, to draw China’s citizens ever nearer to the Party by giving them tangible reminders of the Party’s largesse and molding them into...
Media
10.15.21ChinaFile Presents: In the Camps—China’s High-Tech Penal Colony
Darren Byler joined ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes and Jessica Batke to discuss his new book, In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. Evidence has mounted in recent years that China’s government has incarcerated more than one million Uyghurs and...
Viewpoint
09.23.21‘China’s Search for a Modern Identity Has Entered a New and Perilous Phase’
In 1980, writing the last paragraph of the last chapter of Coming Alive: China After Mao, I declared that China was moving “from totalitarian tyranny to a system more humane, part of a struggle by this nation to free itself from a straitjacket woven...
Viewpoint
09.09.21A Farewell to My Students
Xu Zhangrun addresses this letter to the students and young scholars who participated in “The Three Talents Salon” which Xu founded in 2003, a biannual symposium devoted to fostering “three talents” or skills in the participants: in-depth reading,...
Viewpoint
09.02.21How Much Does Beijing Control the Ethnic Makeup of Tibet?
The idea of swamping, which the Dalai Lama himself elaborated in 2008, holds that China’s government has been seeking to solve its problems in Tibet and other “ethnic minority” areas such as Xinjiang by turning local indigenous ethnic groups (such...
Features
08.19.21Homage to Richard Nixon
This short story was written 20 years ago but never published. It is the first piece of original fiction to appear on ChinaFile since our launch in 2013. In a postscript, author Zha Jianying explains that when she unearthed the story earlier this...
Viewpoint
07.20.21Making Sense of Support for Donald Trump in China
As the dust finally settled on the U.S. presidential election that shook the world, Biden was sworn in as president, and Trump, who tried everything to cling to a second term, slunk out of the capital city of Washington, D.C. in disgrace. Looking...
Viewpoint
07.10.21Why China Is Going After Its Tech Giants
Just days after its lucrative listing on the New York Stock Exchange, China ride-hailing giant Didi Global was hit with another round of sanctions by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). On July 4, the country’s Internet regulator ordered...
Viewpoint
05.18.21A Letter to My Editors and to China’s Censors
Xu Zhangrun, perhaps China’s most famous dissident legal scholar, released a letter addressed not only to China’s censors but also to the editors and publishers with whom he had worked for decades. That essay, translated below, is Letter Eight in...
Viewpoint
05.14.21Ahead of Its Centennial, the Chinese Communist Party Frets Over Unsanctioned Takes on Its History
On July 1, the Chinese Communist Party will commemorate its founding in Shanghai one hundred years ago. Unsurprisingly, Beijing is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that nothing untoward takes place in the run-up to the great day. On April 9, the...
Features
05.03.21New Data Show Hong Kong’s National Security Arrests Follow a Pattern
In the nine months since the Hong Kong National Security Law was passed, more than 90 people have been arrested under the new legislation. Though they have been charged with various breaches of national security ranging from inciting secession to...
Viewpoint
04.27.21The Right Way to Bring Chinese STEM Talent Back to the U.S.
The Trump administration deployed a raft of restrictions on international students and workers, many of which directly targeted or disproportionally impacted Chinese STEM talent. While some measures had a basis in legitimate concerns like illicit...
Viewpoint
04.23.21‘I Stand the Law’s Good Servant, but the People’s First’
Former legislator and prominent lawyer Margaret Ng was given a suspended sentence of 12 months. In her sentencing statement, which she read out in open court, Ng recounted her career in law and politics, interweaving her own story with the decades-...
Viewpoint
04.01.21Will Protests against China Push Beijing to Intervene in Myanmar?
Angry with the results of the November election, which saw a landslide win for the ruling National League for Democracy party, Myanmar’s military claimed electoral fraud. On February 1, they seized power from the civilian government, rounding up...
Viewpoint
03.25.21Abandoning Criticism of China’s Government Isn’t the Right Way to End Anti-Asian Racism in the U.S.
The recent surge of anti-Asian violence across the U.S., culminating in the tragedy of the Atlanta shooting, reminds us that the mainstream (mis)representation of Asian Americans as a model minority never spares us from racist hatred and the...
Viewpoint
01.22.21In Xinjiang, Rare Protests Came Amid Lockdown
Six months after China rolled out its first coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan in late January 2020, Urumqi was placed under quarantine. The first lockdown specifically targeting the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, rather than the...
Features
12.30.20‘Because There Were Cameras, I Didn’t Ask Any Questions’
Sometime in the summer of 2019, Vera Zhou, a young college student from the University of Washington, forgot to pretend that she was from the non-Muslim majority group in China, the Han. At a checkpoint at the mall, she put her ID on the scanner and...
Features
12.21.20Pretty Lady Cadres
In early February, at the beginning of the outbreak of the deadly COVID-19 virus in China, Wang Fang, a local Communist Party secretary, was working around the clock. As an official responsible for 19,000 residents of a neighborhood in the city of...
Features
12.20.20Message Control
Li Wenliang’s death had only been announced a few hours earlier, but Warming High-Tech was already on the case. The company had been monitoring online mentions of the COVID-whistleblower’s name in the several days since police had detained and...
Viewpoint
12.09.20How the CCP Took over the Most Sacred of Uighur Rituals
The rooster hadn’t even stopped his crowing when the police arrived at my Uighur host’s courtyard in rural Turpan one early spring morning in 2008. Although they spoke calmly, almost apologetically, the uniformed Uighur officers demanded that the...