Big Brother Comes Wooing

Economist
For more than six decades after the Chinese civil war, the mainland did not allow its minister-level officials openly to set foot in Taiwan. This changed on June 25th when Zhang Zhijun, director of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, visited the island...

China Official Makes Rare Cross-Strait Trip in Effort to Forge Ties With Taiwan

Jenny W. Hsu
Wall Street Journal
China's top cross-strait negotiator began a landmark visit to Taiwan aimed at forging ties with the Taiwanese people amid growing skepticism toward Beijing.

Books

06.25.14

Chinese Comfort Women

Peipei Qiu with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei
During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate.Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Japan's Imperial Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery—much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive.The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by and the conditions that caused them. —Oxford University Press {chop}

To Bolster Its Claims, China Plants Islands in Disputed Waters

Edward Wong and Jonathan Ansfield
New York Times
China has been moving sand onto reefs and shoals to add several new islands to the Spratly archipelago, in what foreign officials say is a new effort to expand the Chinese footprint in the South China Sea.

Anson Chan on Beijing’s Pressure Tactics in Hong Kong

Michael Forsythe
New York Times
In an interview, Anson Chan talked about what she sees as increasing control from Beijing, which had guaranteed Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy until 2047 under the “One Country, Two Systems” formula.

China Cultivates India Amid Tension With Neighbors

Christopher Bodeen
ABC
Amid fierce disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, China is reaching out to India in a warming trend that could help ramp up economic exchanges and dissipate decades of distrust between the two giant neighbors.

Elaborate Lattice Work in Confucius Lane

Sue Ann
Shanghai Street Stories
In my few years of photographing old houses around Shanghai, I have never been this buoyant over lattice woodwork in its original setting.

China Media: White Paper on Hong Kong

BBC
Media in China give full support to an official document reaffirming total control over Hong Kong, while papers in the special administrative region express pessimism over the future.

Conversation

06.11.14

Is a Declining U.S. Good for China?

Zha Daojiong, Gordon G. Chang & more
Zha Daojiong:Talk of a U.S. decline is back in vogue. This time, China features more (if not most) prominently in a natural follow-up question: Which country is going to benefit? My answer: certainly not China.Arguably, the first round of “U.S.-in-...

Caixin Media

06.10.14

A Jesuit Astronomer in a Qing Emperor’s Court

Sheila Melvin
Of the 920 Jesuits who served in the China mission between 1552 and 1800, only the Italian Matteo Ricci (Li Madou) remains well known. This is understandable—it was Ricci who first gained permission for the Jesuits to live in Beijing and who...

Despite Critics, China Asserts Democratic Progress in Hong Kong

Gerry Mullany
New York Times
A week after roughly 100,000 people turned out in Hong Kong in a protest directed at China’s Communist leadership, Beijing has issued a ringing of defence of its oversight of the territory.

Young Chinese Twitter User Arrested for Proposing Method to Spread Truth About June 4th Massacre

China Change
On Monday China’s state-run media outlet China News (中新网) reported that Beijing police had arrested a 22-year-old female for posting an article on Twitter that teaches how to use a pseudo base station “to send illegal information.”

Commentary: China, India Strategic Partners, not Rivals

Chen Shilei
Xinhua
China and India have had more high level exchange this past year than in nearly 60 years because they know common development can only be achieved through a strategic cooperative partnership.

State Firms Barred from Vietnam Contract Bids

Keira Lu Huang
South China Morning Post
Vietnamese and Chinese ships have been clashing since China set up an oil rig near disputed island in the South China Sea last month. Tensions over the move caused anti-China riots in Vietnam.

Books

06.09.14

Voices from Tibet

Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, Edited and Translated by Violet S. Law
Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong are widely regarded as the most eloquent, insightful writers on contemporary Tibet. Their reportage on the economic exploitation, environmental degradation, cultural destruction, and political subjugation that plague the increasingly Han Chinese-dominated Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is as powerful as it is profound, ardent, and analytical in equal measure, and not in the least bit ideological. Voices from Tibet is a collection of essays and reportage in translation that captures the many facets of an unprecedented sea change wreaked by a rising China upon a scared land and its defenseless people. With the TAR in a virtual lockdown after the 2008 unrest, this book sheds important light on the simmering frustrations that touched off the unrest and Beijing’s stability über alles control tactics in its wake. The authors also interrogate longstanding assumptions about Tibetans’ political future. Woeser’s and Wang’s writings represent a rare Chinese view sympathetic to Tibetan causes, one that should resonate in many places confronting threats of cultural subjugation and economic domination by a non-indigenous power. —Hong Kong University Press {chop}

Beijing, Vatican Prepare to Resume Talks for the First Time Since 2010

Kristine Kwok
South China Morning Post
Meeting said to be in the works, but recent anti-church actions could complicate dialogue.

The Astrophysicist of Tiananmen

Alex Pasternack
Motherboard
Fang Lizhi, the prominent astrophysicist, was incredulous when, In January 1987, when Deng Xiaoping launched the slogan “modernization with Chinese characteristics.” 

Media

06.05.14

A Time-Lapse Map of Protests Sweeping China in 1989

Twenty-five years ago in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, a group of small-town high school students listening to shortwave radio heard news of a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators nearly 1,000 miles away in the capital of...

Exiled Tiananmen Leader Slips into China

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
Zhou Fengsuo, 47, a student leader in 1989, spent two days in the capital—visiting Tiananmen Square and a detention center where his friends are being held—before the authorities caught him on June 3.

The Ghosts of Tiananmen Square

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Every spring, an old friend of mine named Xu Jue makes a trip to the Babaoshan cemetery in the western suburbs of Beijing to lay flowers on the tombs of her dead son and husband. She always plans her visit for April 5, which is the holiday of Pure...

Never Before Seen Tiananmen Square Photos Found in Shoebox

China Girls
I was searching through my parents’ photos for a piece I was writing on Tiananmen Square and my father, when I stumbled across two rolls of negatives that appeared to be from the 1989 student democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Where the Flame Still Burns

J. C.
Economist
Hong Kong is the only place on Chinese soil where large public commemorations of the Tiananmen massacre take place; elsewhere memorials of the June 4th crackdown remain strictly forbidden.

After Tiananmen Square, New Lives On A New Continent

MICHEL MARTIN
NPR
After the democracy protests were crushed in 1989, many thought China would turn inward. Instead, a million Chinese citizens moved to Africa. Howard French discusses his book China's Second Continent.

The Tiananmen Square Massacre, According to WikiLeaks

Jeff South
Medium
Diplomatic cables chronicle China’s quashing of pro-democracy movement.

25 Years Later, Tiananmen Square Still Colors U.S.-China Relations

Tom Malinowski
U.S. State Department
Today, the United States is asking of the Chinese government what we have asked for 25 years: to provide the fullest possible accounting of the Tiananmen events and to stop retribution against those who wish to remember them.

25 Years Later, Lessons From Tiananmen Square Crackdown

Melinda Liu
National Geographic
A quarter century after democracy protests ended in bloodshed, Chinese still clamor for clean government and courts.

Catholic Cardinal Makes First Appearance at Vigil

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
Cardinal Joseph Zen of the Catholic Church, a longtime advocate of greater democracy in Hong Kong and mainland China, attended the annual candlelight vigil for Tiananmen Square victims for the first time in Hong Kong on Wednesday evening.

Remarks by President Obama at at 25th Anniversary of Freedom Day

Barack Obama
Office of the Press Secretary
Barack Obama reminds Poles that while they voted for democracy twenty-five years ago this day, China crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

In Pictures, Remembering the Tiananmen Square Massacre

Niki Walker
Mashable
Twenty-five years ago on Wednesday, the Chinese government, acting under martial law, deployed 200,000 troops into Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Tiananmen at Twenty-Five: "Victory Over Memory"

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
Today, technology and globalism are prying open the lives of China’s people. But, in matters of politics and history, the Party is determined to silence even the “few flies” that Deng Xiaoping once described as a bearable side effect of an open...

Stuart Franklin: How I Photographed Tiananmen Square and 'Tank Man'

Mee-Lai Stone
Guardian
The Magnum photographer tells his story of the 1989 protests, from peaceful demonstration to bloody crackdown, the iconic 'tank man' – and how hamburgers gave him his big break.

Media

06.03.14

A Day to Remember/A Day Forgotten

Susan Jakes
China’s suppression of the memory of the June 4 massacre of demonstrators in Beijing in 1989 is a perennial and important subject of commentary. Much written on the subject is excellent, but little I’ve seen describes repressed memory in action as...

Tiananmen, Forgotten

Helen Gao
New York Times
To my generation, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades.

Culture

06.03.14

A Visit to Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum

Amy Chung
Every Saturday in Hong Kong, volunteer curator and translator C.S. Liu helps guide visitors through the first permanent museum dedicated to the history of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989 in Beijing.At the entrance to the June 4th...

Features

06.03.14

Voices from Tiananmen

This Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of the deadly suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests on June 4. It has been a quarter of a century of enormous change in China, but one key fact of life in that country has not changed: its leaders...

The Tanks and the People

Liao Yiwu from New York Review of Books
Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.”My father knew what he was talking about. His courage had been broken, by countless political campaigns...

25 Years After the Tiananmen Crackdown

Zhang Hongtu and Zhao Gang
Creative Time Reports
The Asian American Arts Centre responded to the June 1989 events with an open-call exhibition of artworks related to the uprising and its suppression called “China: June 4, 1989.” To commemorate the event's 25th anniversary, Creative Time...

Conversation

06.02.14

25 Years On, Can China Move Past Tiananmen?

Xu Zhiyuan, Arthur Waldron & more
Xu Zhiyuan:Whenever the massacre at Tiananmen Square twenty-five years ago comes up in conversation, I think of Faulkner’s famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Some believe that China’s economic growth and rise to international...

Video

06.02.14

Cairo in Chinese

Alison Klayman
When Shen Yitong left her home in China to study French at Cairo University in 2008, she didn’t know that she would come to think of Egypt as a second home, or that she would see revolution come upon the country so suddenly. Her parents came from...

‘You Won’t Get Near Tiananmen!’: Hu Jia on the Continuing Crackdown

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Hu Jia is one of China’s best-known political activists. He participated in the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a fifteen-year-old, studied economics, and then worked for environmental and public health non-governmental organizations. A practicing...

Features

05.31.14

Resources on the Tiananmen Square Protests: 25 Years Later

This June 4 marks 25 years since the military crackdown on student protestors in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, following months of demonstrations. This resource page includes links to our recently published pieces and to our archived...

China Cleans Up the Internet by Squelching Dissent

Dexter Roberts
Businessweek
A new government campaign aims to crack down on spreading “rumors” and harmful information through chat groups on instant messaging services such as Tencent’s WeChat.

Excerpts

05.28.14

‘Staying’—An Excerpt from ‘People’s Republic of Amnesia’

Louisa Lim
Zhang Ming has become used to his appearance startling small children. Skeletally thin, with cheeks sunk deep into his face, he walked gingerly across the cream-colored hotel lobby as if his limbs were made of glass. On his forehead were two large,...

Why Vietnam Can’t Count on Its Neighbors to Rally Against China

Bruce Einhorn
Businessweek
China knows Vietnam can do little to stop it; while an appeal by Vietnam to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations could make the fight more equal, it’s not likely to be very effective.

International China Welcomes New Indian Government

Associated Press
China is "ready to work with the new Indian government to maintain high-level contact, strengthen cooperation and communication in all areas," former Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told Ambassador Ashok Kumar Kantha.

China Tensions Grow After Vietnamese Ship Sinks in Clash

Jane Perlez
New York Times
Hair-trigger tensions in the South China Sea escalated as China and Vietnam traded accusations over the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing vessel in the vicinity of a Chinese oil rig parked in disputed waters off Vietnam’s coast.

Features

05.27.14

China’s Experiment with Deliberative Democracy

Rebecca Liao
Chinese pro-democracy protests begun in the late spring of 1989 led to the brutal military suppression on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 25 years ago this June 4. Around the world, discussions of the events of that spring have been well underway for...

China warns Japan, Philippines Accuses China in Maritime Spat

Sui-Lee Wee and Manuel Mogato
Reuters
China claims almost the entire South China Sea, rejecting rival claims to parts of it from Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei.

Environment

05.23.14

Killing Pika Won’t Save Tibetan Grasslands

from chinadialogue
A pest extermination campaign is under way on western China’s Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. But experts say there is no scientific basis for the killing of the pika, a small rabbit-like mammal, and warn that the campaign may throw the ecosystem further...

The Smooth Path to Pearl Harbor

Rana Mitter from New York Review of Books
In mid-February, as part of the plans for his official visit to Germany, Chinese President Xi Jinping asked to visit one of Berlin’s best-known sites: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The request was declined when it became...

Vietnam PM Says Considering Legal Action Against China Over Disputed Waters

Rosemarie Francisco and Manuel Mogato
Reuters
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said his government was considering various "defense options" against China, including legal action, following the deployment of a Chinese oil rig to South China Sea waters Hanoi also claims.

China and Russia: Best Frenemies

Economist
Does the new collaboration between Russia and China amount to a renewal of the alliance against America?

UglyGorilla Hacker Left Tracks, U.S. Cyber-Hunters Say

Michael A. Riley and Dune Lawrence
Bloomberg
Prosecutors building a case against Wang Dong, one of five Chinese military hackers indicted for economic espionage, were helped by Wang’s apparent willingness to break a cardinal rule of spying: Leave no tracks.

31 Dead, 90 Injured in China Marketplace Bombing

Didi Tang
Associated Press
Assailants in two SUVs plowed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in China's volatile northwestern region of Xinjiang, killing 31 people and injuring more than 90, local officials said.

“The Big Bang Theory” and Our Future with China

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
The United States has never faced a rival whose ordinary people lead lives that have so much in common with ours in America. (The Soviets did not get Carson.)

China Accuses U.S. of Hypocrisy Amid Charges of Economic Espionage

Massoud Hayoun
Al Jazeera
Unresolved allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on a Chinese telecoms giant Huawei have resurfaced amid growing anger from Chinese officials over accusations that the PLA hacked American databases.

Tiananmen: How Wrong We Were

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
Twenty-five years ago to the day I write this, I watched and listened as thousands of Chinese citizens in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square dared to condemn their leaders. Some shouted “Premier Li Peng resign.” Even braver ones cried “Down with Deng...

Caixin Media

05.19.14

“White Glove” Sisters at Center of Coal Country Graft Scandal

Two sisters with business savvy and important friends in high places are now the standout figures in the mysterious case of a former Shanxi province government official, Jin Daoming, charged with corruption.Few details of the Jin case have emerged...

Don’t Call Me Dude, Boss or Bro. It’s Comrade to You

Didi Kirsten Tatlow
New York Times
A new notice demands greater “naming discipline” from party members and officials, warning that using “vulgar” terms of address in the workplace was “wrecking inner-party democracy.” 

Up to 21 Dead as Anti-China Riots Spread in Vietnam

Nguyen Phuong Linh, Martin Petty,...
Reuters
The deaths occurred in rioting around Chinese factories that amount to one of the worst breakdowns in Sino-Vietnamese relations since the neighbors fought a brief border war in 1979.