Media
06.18.12Happiness with Chinese Characteristics
On April 2, 2012, the United Nations released the first World Happiness Report on the occasion of its first General Assembly on “Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining a New Economic Paradigm.” It ranked China the 112th happiest country out of 156. As an...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.15.12Has China’s Young Jedi Knight Just Joined the Dark Side?
Has China’s most famous blogger finally been brought to heel? Han Han, writer, car racer, and China’s youth opinion leader, recently sealed a deal with massive Chinese Internet company Tencent and founded an e-journal, “One.”
ChinaFile Recommends
06.14.12Can China's Rust Belt Reinvent Itself?
Foreign Policy
To understand this industrial Chinese city's past, begin with the smoldering crater on the south side of town, an open-pit coal mine as wide as Manhattan and deeper than the height of the Chrysler Building. Known as Haizhou, or "Sea State...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.12.12Northern Girls: Interview With Author Sheng Keyi
Danwei
Qian Xiaohong is a young woman from a village in Hunan who went to the boomtown of Shenzhen in the 1990s in search of work. She is bold and optimistic, if sometimes a little naïve, and has short black hair with just a hint of curl. She has the round...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.12.12HK Honey
Nowness
High above one of the world's busiest and most congested city streets, urban apiarist Michael Leung runs his crusade for conscious local food, documented in Virgile Simon Bertrand’s inspiring photographs. Leung founded HK Honey as a way of...
Books
06.12.12Eating Bitterness
Every year over 200 million peasants flock to China’s urban centers, providing a profusion of cheap labor that helps fuel the country’s staggering economic growth. Award-winning journalist Michelle Dammon Loyalka follows the trials and triumphs of eight such migrants—including a vegetable vendor, an itinerant knife sharpener, a free-spirited recycler, and a cash-strapped mother—offering an inside look at the pain, self-sacrifice, and uncertainty underlying China’s dramatic national transformation. At the heart of the book lies each person’s ability to “eat bitterness”—a term that roughly means to endure hardships, overcome difficulties, and forge ahead. These stories illustrate why China continues to advance, even as the rest of the world remains embroiled in financial turmoil. At the same time, Eating Bitterness demonstrates how dealing with the issues facing this class of people constitutes China’s most pressing domestic challenge. —University of California Press{chop}
Media
06.11.12Did A CCTV Anchor’s Outburst Even Matter?
Yang Rui, a host on China Central Television's (CCTV) English-language channel, called on the Public Security Bureau via Sina Weibo on May 16 to “clean out foreign trash, wipe out foreign snake heads (human smugglers), root out foreign spies,...
Media
06.07.12An Absent Presence
In Chan Koonchung’s dystopian science fiction novel The Fat Years, set in China in 2013, the whole month of Feburary 2011 has disappeared from people’s memory. In reality, the month that is closest to being spirited away is the month of June 1989...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.05.12Fallows on Bad Air and Soft Power
Atlantic
This is another fascinating installment in the exercise of Chinese "soft power." For my Big Theory on the nature of Chinese soft power, see this essay and this book. For a few previous installments in the Soft-Power Watch, see this, this,...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.27.12Chinese Architect Blasts Demolition Culture
Financial Times
The Chinese winner of architecture’s most prestigious award has criticised the wanton demolition that has left many of the nation’s cities fragmented and almost unrecognisable to their citizens. The comments from Wang Shu, who will on Friday receive...
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05.27.12What the Chinese Want
Wall Street Journal
Apple has taken China by storm. A Starbucks can be found on practically every major street corner in coastal cities and beyond. From Nike to Buick to Siemens, Chinese consumers actively prefer Western brands over their domestic competitors. The rise...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.23.12Neil Heywood Death Investigation Reopened
Guardian
A prominent American forensic scientist said that Chinese police asked him to analyse an unidentified blood sample, in a possible link to a spiralling political scandal surrounding the death of a British man. Henry Lee said police did not directly...
Media
05.18.12Drunken Brit Assaults Chinese Woman in Beijing
A drunken foreigner was caught sexually assaulting a Chinese woman in Beijing near the Xuanwumen subway station. Pedestrians stopped him and it ended in a fight. This video shows the initial confrontation with the foreigner and then jumps to the...
Media
05.11.12Ferrari Stunt Scars 600-Year-Old Monument
Netizens are outraged after a 60-second stunt by car manufacturer Ferrari leaves a 600 year-old historical site marred with skid marks.From Youku
Sinica Podcast
12.06.11The Soul of Beijing
from Sinica Podcast
Today, we’re pleased to share a special live edition of Sinica recorded last Saturday at Capital M in Beijing. Held to a standing-room only crowd, we talked all about our ongoing love-hate relationship with Beijing, and asked what on earth is...
Reports
03.11.11Environmental and Social Impact Assessment: Urumqi District Heating Project
World Bank
The city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in westernmost China, is experiencing rapid urbanization and economic growth, which poses challenges to Urumqi Municipal Government in providing adequate and efficient public...
Reports
10.01.10Market Transformation for Urban Energy Efficiency in China
He Jianan
Global Environmental Institute
The acute energy shortage faced by many Chinese cities has dragged down local productivity and living standards. Cities are motivated to actively seek solutions to minimize the gap between energy demand and supply. This project aims to lay out...
Sinica Podcast
09.10.10Showdown in Shenzhen
from Sinica Podcast
On September 6, Shenzhen celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its founding as a special economic zone (SEZ). And while the city feted itself at the highest levels of power, its celebrations were marred by an unexpected development: in a speech...
Sinica Podcast
07.12.10Ich Bin Ein Beijinger
from Sinica Podcast
Sad as it is to admit, the rare solar eclipse that incited such mayhem on Easter Island earlier this week has thrown our own Beijing community into a tizzy. Or perhaps the culprit is the stultifying heatwave which has descended on our city, turning...
Reports
01.01.10“Where Darkness Knows No Limits”: Incarceration, Ill-Treatment, and Forced Labor as Drug Rehabilitation in China
Sara Segal-Williams
Human Rights Watch
Based on research in Yunnan and Guangxi provinces, this report documents how China's June 2008 Anti-Drug Law compounds the health risks of suspected illicit drug users by allowing government officials and security forces to incarcerate them for...
The NYRB China Archive
11.19.09The Empire of Sister Ping
from New York Review of Books
The headquarters of what was once the global people-smuggling operation of Cheng Chui Ping, aka Sister Ping, who is serving thirty-five years at a federal prison for women in Danbury, Connecticut, is now the Yung Sun seafood restaurant at 47 East...
The NYRB China Archive
03.26.09The Death and Life of a Great Chinese City
from New York Review of Books
Judging from the evidence of Michael Meyer’s portrait of life in a narrow backstreet of Beijing as China prepared for the Olympic Games, old Beijing has been vanishing for a very long time. “Peking you simply would not be able to recognize except by...
The NYRB China Archive
06.12.03AsiaWorld
from New York Review of Books
To stand somewhere in the center of an East Asian metropolis, Seoul, say, or Guangzhou, is to face an odd cultural conundrum. Little of what you see, apart from the writing on billboards, can be described as traditionally Asian. There are the faux-...
The NYRB China Archive
04.11.02China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier
from New York Review of Books
In China’s Mao years you could be detained and persecuted for talking with your neighbor about your cat. The Chinese word for “cat” (mao, high level tone) is a near homonym for the name of the Great Leader (mao, rising tone), and a tip to the police...
The NYRB China Archive
05.11.00China’s Dirty Clean-Up
from New York Review of Books
Every year, millions of China’s poorest and most vulnerable people are arrested on the streets of the nation’s cities merely because the way they look or speak identifies them clearly as “outsiders,” not native to the city in question, or because...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.18.96China - New York ... or Singapore?
New York Times
It is better not to be in Shanghai during a heat wave. I was there during the first week in September when a heat wave struck, the hottest September day in 48 years: 87 degrees at night and as humid as a steam bath. Schools closed, as did many...