ChinaFile Recommends
12.26.15Japan Protests Intrusion of Armed Chinese Vessel Into its Waters
Bloomberg
The vessel was formerly a People’s Liberation Army Navy ship and is now operated by another department.
Conversation
12.23.15China in 2016
What should China watchers be watching most closely in China in 2016? What developments would be the most meaningful? What predictions can be made sensibly?
Media
12.22.15‘New Yorker’ Writers Reflect on ‘Extreme’ Reporting About China
from Asia Blog
While international reporting on China has improved by leaps and bounds since foreign journalists first started trickling into the country in the 1970s, major challenges remain in giving readers back home a balanced image. That was the message from...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.11.15A Wordless Elegy for China’s War Dead
New York Times
Mr. Wang explained why he wanted to write a requiem about a war that ended 70 years ago.
Books
12.10.15Pacific
Following his acclaimed Atlantic and The Men Who United the States, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this imposing force of nature.As the Mediterranean shaped the classical world, and the Atlantic connected Europe to the New World, the Pacific Ocean defines our tomorrow. With China on the rise, so, too, are the American cities of the West coast, including Seattle, San Francisco, and the long cluster of towns down the Silicon Valley.Today, the Pacific is ascendant. Its geological history has long transformed us—tremendous earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis—but its human history, from a Western perspective, is quite young, beginning with Magellan’s sixteenth-century circumnavigation. It is a natural wonder whose most fascinating history is currently being made.In telling the story of the Pacific, Simon Winchester takes us from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn, the Yangtze River to the Panama Canal, and to the many small islands and archipelagos that lie in between. He observes the fall of a dictator in Manila, visits aboriginals in northern Queensland, and is jailed in Tierra del Fuego, the land at the end of the world. His journey encompasses a trip down the Alaska Highway, a stop at the isolated Pitcairn Islands, and a trek across South Korea and a glimpse of its mysterious northern neighbor.Winchester’s personal experience is vast and his storytelling second to none. And his historical understanding of the region is formidable, making Pacific a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination that is transforming our lives. —HarperCollins{chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
12.07.15Xi'an City Wall: How China Turned A Military Site Into A Unique Park
CNN
Xi'an, China's 637-year-old city wall is a relatively new kid on the block.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.03.15You Can't Understand China Unless You Know How the Communist Party Thinks
Huffington Post
The CPC came into being in 1921, almost a century ago.
Caixin Media
12.02.15Zhang Zhixin: The Woman who Took on the ‘Gang of Four’
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The desire not to dwell on that tumultuous decade, after half a century has passed, is understandable, but the failure to reflect on its impact, offer a full...
Viewpoint
11.30.15Court in China Adds Last-Minute Charge Against Rights Leader During Sentencing
from China Change
On August 8, 2013, Guo Feixiong (real name Yang Maodong) was arrested and then indicted on charges of “gathering a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.” The heavy sentence came as a shock to everyone following the case. More shockingly, the...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.24.15Tibet, Taiwan and China – A Complex Nexus
Diplomat
Recent developments in cross-strait relations raise interesting questions for Tibet’s leadership in exile.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.24.15Ever Wonder How China Got Back Into International Diplomacy After the Cultural Revolution?
Diplomat
China’s successful entry into the international scene after the Cultural Revolution bears lessons for other pariah states.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.23.15Would India Dare Risk Antagonizing China?
Council on Foreign Relations
I found a striking consensus about the relative stability between the two giant Asian neighbors.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.23.15Hong Kong May Be A Little Insecure, But It's No 'Slave'
South China Morning Post
I don't much care to weigh in on the subject of Hong Kong remaining a place where non-Asians are able to prosper.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.20.15China Is Trying to Warn Taiwan Voters
Bloomberg
The possibility of conflict between China and Taiwan is dangerous to the world’s security.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.20.15Why 2,500-Year-Old Tale Gives Ma Hope for Chinese Democracy
Bloomberg
Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou said history gives him hope for political change on the Communist-ruled mainland.
Conversation
11.19.15Is China a Credible Partner in Fighting Terror?
In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said, “China is also a victim of terrorism. The fight against the ‘East Turkestan Islamic Movement’… should become an important part of the international fight against...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.18.15McDonald's China Heritage Outlet Criticised
BBC
The opening of a McDonald's outlet in the home of former Taiwanese leader Chiang Ching-kuo in Hangzhou, China has sparked a controversy.
Conversation
11.18.15How Can China’s Neighbors Make Progress at APEC?
Ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit next week, we asked a group of experts from China’s neighboring countries what they thought the main thrust of discussion in Manila should be. If host, the Philippines, under pressure from...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.18.15India-China Talks Fail To Make Progress on Border Dispute
Defense News
"This is the highest level defense delegation to visit India in the recent years. The visit signifies the enhanced defense exchanges between India and China."
ChinaFile Recommends
11.16.15China Tired of the Boiler Suit
Guardian
“Why can people who glory in color and fun and variety wear a uniform of boiler suits that brings drabness and dreariness to every gathering?”
ChinaFile Recommends
11.12.15Q. and A.: Ezra F. Vogel on China’s Shifting Relations With Japan and Taiwan
New York Times
Mr. Vogel is working on a book that will explore moments in history when China and Japan were in closest contact.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.12.15Nancy Pelosi Made Rare Visit to Tibet, China Says
New York Times
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, visited Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
Caixin Media
11.10.15Mao’s ‘Proud Poplar’: Yang Kaihui
Yang Kaihui—who was killed 85 years ago this month—was the first of Mao Zedong’s three freely chosen wives. (Mao was forced by his parents to wed an older neighbor when he was just 14 but did not consider this a true marriage.) Yang’s dramatic, and...
Media
11.09.15Can the China Model Succeed?
Is this a new model? Is authoritarian capitalism, Leninist capitalism, something that has durability? Have the rules changed about how countries develop? That used to be, remember, that open markets led ineluctably to open societies. How does it...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.09.15Leaders of Taiwan and China Hold Historic Meeting
Economist
It was a brief encounter—an hour of discussions followed by a low-key dinner—but one of great historical resonance.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.06.15Meeting With Taiwan Reflects Limits of China’s Checkbook
New York Times
For the past eight years, the Chinese government has showered its former enemies in Taiwan with economic gifts.
Media
11.06.15‘A Brutality Born of Helplessness’
When China finally scrapped its one-child policy after more than three decades of brutality, almost no one lamented its passing. But Paul R. Ehlich, a Stanford-educated biologist and author of the 1968 fear-baiting classic The Population Bomb, was...
Conversation
11.05.15The China-Taiwan Summit
This Saturday, for the first time since 1949, the leaders of China and Taiwan will meet face to face. Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou will meet in Singapore, not as Presidents, but—to sidestep one of many lingering areas of conflict since the Chinese...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.04.153 Things Taiwan Wants From China
Time
Here are three issues that are likely to be on the top of Ma’s agenda after seven decades without a face-to-face meeting.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.04.15Call Me Mister: Taiwan, China Presidents to Hold Historic Meeting
CNN
The leaders of Taiwan and China plan to meet in Singapore on Saturday for the first time since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.03.15How China Wants to Rate Its Citizens
New Yorker
In certain respects, a national credit system of some kind is long overdue in China.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.02.15Q. and A.: Chan Koonchung on Imagining a Non-Communist China
New York Times
We’re in Beijing — no, Beiping — Dec. 10, 1979.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.02.15China, Japan and South Korea Relations 'Completely Restored' After Summit
CNN
"All sides shared the view that trilateral cooperation has been completely restored in this meeting."
ChinaFile Recommends
11.02.15Amartya Sen: Women’s Progress Outdid China’s One-Child Policy
New York Times
The abandonment of the one-child policy in China is a momentous change.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.29.15Yan Lianke: Understand the Enemy
Huffington Post
"I think that my fate cannot be separated from literature."
ChinaFile Recommends
10.26.15Two-Child Policy Is Too Little, Too Late
Bloomberg
When Chinese leaders convene this week for a four-day meeting on the future of the country’s economy, the biggest news might have to do with babies.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.26.15‘Kingdom of Daughters’ in China Draws Tourists to Its Matrilineal Society
New York Times
It was morning in the lakeside village of Luoshui here in southwestern China.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.26.15India Is Spending Billions to Populate a Remote Area Claimed by China
Bloomberg
"If China is developing on their side of the territory, we should develop on our side."
Caixin Media
10.23.15Hemingway's Literary Escape
One noonday in 2002, a friendly acquaintance of mine—I’ll call him Q—left his office in a Beijing concert hall to go to lunch and never returned. After a series of inquiries, his wife and colleagues learned that he had been arrested. Various charges...
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10.23.15How Hungry Is China for the World's Food?
CNBC
China's transformation from an agrarian economy remains a work in progress.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.23.15Beijing Says Won't Give up Position that Taiwan's Part of China
Reuters
Chinese people have a "sacred mission" to ensure Taiwan is always considered part of China.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.22.15Human Rights: What Is China Accused of?
BBC
China's human rights record has been criticised for years.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.22.15Nobel Renews Debate on Chinese Medicine
New York Times
As China basks in its first Nobel Prize in science, few places seem as elated, or bewildered, by the honor as the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.
The NYRB China Archive
10.22.15The Bloodthirsty Deng We Didn’t Know
from New York Review of Books
“Deng was…a bloody dictator who, along with Mao, was responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people, thanks to the terrible social reforms and unprecedented famine of 1958–1962.” This is the conclusion of Alexander Pantsov and Steven...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.21.15As Britain Greets Xi With Pageantry, Magna Carta Gets Less-Than-Royal Treatment in China
WSJ: China Real Time Report
Conversation
10.20.15Britain: ‘China’s Best Partner in the West’?
This week, Xi Jinping is in Great Britain for a state visit, his first since assuming leadership of China nearly three years ago. Britain’s government under David Cameron has signaled—increasingly loudly in recent months—that it hopes to usher in a...
Conversation
10.16.15Is There a China Model?
The most recent public event in our ChinaFile Presents series, which we held October 15 in New York, was a discussion of the philosopher Daniel A. Bell’s controversial book, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, co-...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.16.15A Remote Corner of China Wants Access to the Sea. The Obstacle Is North Korea.
Washington Post
You can almost smell the sea air from here, at the point where China, Russia and North Korea meet.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.16.15Ai Weiwei Memoir Coming in Spring 2017
Newsweek
Crown Publishing Group announced that it will publish a memoir by the artist in the spring of 2017.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15Ancient Teeth Found in China Challenge Modern Human Migration Theory
CNN
Scientists in southern China have discovered human teeth dating back at least 80,000 years.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15The Chinese Oscar Winner that Wasn’t
Foreign Policy
Wolf Totem is a spectacular film, but its soul is missing. That's just how Beijing wants it.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15Mao and Other Cultural Inspirations
New York Times
“An army without culture is a dull-witted army,” Mao Zedong wrote, “and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15China Burnishes Xi Jinping’s Legend With TV Drama of His Years in Rural Hamlet
Guardian
Chinese bloggers label 45-part drama called Liangjiahe as latest homage to omnipotent ‘Big Daddy Xi’.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.14.15ChinaFile Recommends
10.14.15Survivors Tell the Camera the Hidden Tale of China's Great Famine
Los Angeles Times
When Li Yaqin was 16, she ate what her family could scavenge.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.14.15'Hunting' for China at the Democratic Debate
Washington Post
Jim Webb wanted to talk China.The rest of the candidates? Not so much.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.13.15Japan May Halt Funds for UNESCO Over Nanjing Row With China
Reuters
Japan's military aggression before and during World War Two still haunts ties between Asia's two biggest economies.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.13.15Top China Paper Says U.S., Russia Playing Cold War Game in Syria
Reuters
The United States and Russia seemed to be using Syria as a proxy for diplomatic and military competition, as during the Cold War.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.13.15A Land China Loves and Hates
New York Times
The Chinese hostility to America is first and foremost the result of government propaganda.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.08.15When Palace Museum Meets Creativity
China Daily
In the minds of most people, Emperor and his concubines lived their lives solemnly.