China Sets Timeline for Resolving Bo Xilai Scandal

Bloomberg
China set a timeline for the prosecution of disgraced Politburo member Bo Xilai, moving to resolve a scandal that overshadowed a once-in-a-decade transfer of power and tested the unity of new Communist Party leaders.

China Orders Ban on New Government Buildings

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
The new directive, which bans the construction of government buildings for the next five years, showed clear signs of being a continuation of the anticorruption campaign, describing the ban as “important for building a clean government” and...

Former China Party Highflier Bo Xilai Is Charged With Corruption

WSJ: China Real Time Report
The indictment accuses Mr. Bo of taking advantage of his position "to seek profits for others" and accepting an "extremely large amount" in money and property, Xinhua said. "He also embezzled a huge amount of public money...

Environment

07.25.13

Comment: Polluters Shouldn’t Be the Judge of Other Polluters

from chinadialogue
If the law sets a criminal to catch other criminals what do you think those criminals will think? My colleagues have discovered that new legislation threatens to do just that.A new draft revision of the Environmental Protection Law is now online for...

Glaxo Chief Executive Addresses China Inquiry

Katie Thomas
New York Times
Andrew Witty, chief executive of the drug maker GlaxoSmithKline, said on Wednesday that the accusations of bribery and corruption against his company in China were “deeply disappointing.” But he said that Glaxo’s headquarters in London had not been...

More Foreign Pharmaceutical Firms Could Be Probed In China

Michael Martina
Reuters
China's official news agency hinted that more foreign pharmaceutical firms could soon be implicated in a corruption scandal sweeping the industry, in the wake of bribery accusations against British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline. ...

Bo Xilai Charged With Corruption, Bribery, Abuse of Power

Bloomberg
“Defendant Bo Xilai used his official state position to seek benefits, illegally accepted an extremely huge amount of property from others, embezzled a huge amount of public money, and abused his power, resulting in huge losses to the nation and the...

Former China Party Highflier Bo Xilai Is Charged With Corruption

Jeremy Page and Lingling Wei
Wall Street Journal
The indictment accuses Mr. Bo of taking advantage of his position “to seek profits for others” and accepting an “extremely large amount” in money and property, Xinhua said. 

Conversation

07.25.13

The Bo Xilai Trial: What’s It Really About?

Jerome A. Cohen, Andrew J. Nathan & more
China has charged disgraced senior politician Bo Xilai with bribery, abuse of power and corruption, paving the way for a potentially divisive trial. But what’s at stake goes beyond the fate of one allegedly corrupt official: Is it really a fight...

Features

07.24.13

Carried Off

Charlie Custer
In March 2011, Rose Candis had the worst lunch of her life. Sitting at a restaurant in Shaoguan, a small city in South China, the American mother tried hard not to vomit while her traveling companion translated what the man they were eating with had...

Features

07.23.13

Discrimination in China’s Schools

In a new report titled As Long As They Let Us Stay in Class: Barriers to Education for Persons with Disabilities in China, the New York-based non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) outlines systemic discrimination...

Glaxo Says Executives May Have Broken Chinese Law

David Barboza
New York Times
The British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline said Monday that some of its executives might have broken the law in China, the company’s strongest statement yet on a bribery and corruption scandal that has engulfed its China...

China’s New Visa Laws Target Expats

Craig Hill
China Daily Mail
On July 1st 2013, China introduced new visa laws for foreigners, supposedly targeting illegal workers, but in reality targeting all expats in China. Mostly it seems about being able to control...

China Bars GlaxoSmithKline Executive From Leaving During a Bribery Inquiry

David Barboza
New York Times
The effort to restrict Steve Nechelput’s travel came as the government ramped up an unusually bold anti-corruption campaign against GlaxoSmithKline, which is one of the world’s biggest drug makers. 

Conversation

07.18.13

Xu Zhiyong Arrested: How Serious Can Beijing Be About Political Reform?

Donald Clarke, Andrew J. Nathan & more
Donald Clarke:When I heard that Xu Zhiyong had just been detained, my first thought was, “Again?” This seems to be something the authorities do every time they get nervous, a kind of political Alka Seltzer to settle an upset constitution. I searched...

Viewpoint

07.16.13

CFIUS and the U.S. Senate’s Anti-China Bug

Samuel Kleiner
Last week, senators from both parties finally came together for a common objective: stopping the $4.7 billion sale of America’s largest pork producer to China. Their reason? The sale of Smithfield Farms to a Chinese company, Shuanghui, could pose a...

Conversation

07.16.13

What’s the Senate’s Beef with China’s Play for American Pork?

Arthur R. Kroeber, Steve Dickinson & more
Last week the U.S. Senate held hearings to question the CEO of meat-producer Smithfield Farms, about the proposed $4.7 billion sale of the Virginia-based company to Shuanghui International, China’s largest pork producer. The sale is under review by...

China’s Blackout of U.S. Media Can No Longer Be Ignored

Jim Sciutto
Washington Post
Web censorship is not just an inconvenience but also a reminder that many leading U.S. media and technology companies are excluded, or largely excluded, from one of the world’s largest markets and this country’s largest trading partner. ...

Viewpoint

07.11.13

China at the Tipping Point?

Carl Minzner
What will be the future of China’s authoritarian political system?Many predicted that China’s rapid development over the past several decades would inevitably lead to gradual liberalization. Economic growth was expected to generate a cascade of...

Books

07.09.13

Legal Orientalism

Teemu Ruskola
Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism,” a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day.The first Sino–U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish–American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late-nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.     —Harvard University Press

Filmmaker Du Bin Released on Bail

Sophie Beach
China Digital Times
Fimmaker, photographer and author Du Bin has been released after five weeks in detention in Beijing. On May 31, Du disappeared from his apartment in Beijing and was held by the police. Du was released on...

Don’t Let Cyber Security Overshadow Key China-U.S. Dialogue

Yang Qingchuan
China Daily
To complete the unprecedented task of forging new-type relationship between the world’s largest developing nation and&...

China Vows to Step Up Fight Against Dalai Lama As Shootings Reported

Ben Blanchard
Reuters
“For the sake of national unity and the development of stability in Tibetan regions, we must take a clear-cut stand and deepen the struggle against the Dalai clique,” the official Xinhua news agency cited Yu Zhengsheng as saying. 

A Wave of Self-Immolations Sweeps Tibet

Jeffrey Bartholet
New Yorker
What is the reason behind the self-immolations of more than 100 Tibetans since 2011–monks and nuns, farmers and nomads, adults and teenagers? Some hope the they gain the world’s attention, and bring pressure on China to rethink its Tibet...

Law Requires Chinese to Visit Their Aging Parents

Louise Watt
Associated Press
It’s still unclear how much the amended law changes the status quo. Elderly parents in China already have been suing their adult children for emotional support, and the new wording does not specify how often people must visit, and other details...

Caixin Media

07.01.13

Renewed Growth on the New Third Board

The State Council announced on June 19 that it would expand the New Third Board, an over-the-counter (OTC) market for non-listed companies’ shares, to include all small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) nationwide.One of the experts estimated the...

One Child Policy – Is Reform Gaining Momentum?

Scott Greene
China Digital Times
The reorganization of the Population and Family Planning Comission, and its merger with the Ministry of Health as part of a broader restructuring to streamline China's bureauracy, has raised expectations that Xi Jinping’s new government will...

Conversation

06.27.13

Is Xi Jinping’s Fight Against Corruption For Real?

Roderick MacFarquhar, Winston Lord & more
Roderick MacFarquhar:Xi Jinping’s overriding aim is the preservation of Communist party rule in China, as he made clear in speeches shortly after his elevation to be China’s senior leader.  Like his predecessors, he is obsessed with the...

Media

06.25.13

China’s “Urban Enforcers” Caught in a Vicious Cycle

Last week, another anecdote about chengguan— China’s urban enforcers whose main tasks include enforcing urban beautification ordinances and cracking down on unlicensed street vendors— caught the public’s attention. On June 15, a web user called @岔巴子...

Books

06.25.13

Civil Society in China

Karla W. Simon
This is the definitive book on the legal and fiscal framework for civil society organizations (CSOs) in China from earliest times to the present day. Civil Society in China traces the ways in which laws and regulations have shaped civil society over the 5,000 years of China’s history and looks at ways in which social and economic history have affected the legal changes that have occurred over the millennia.This book provides an historical and current analysis of the legal framework for civil society and citizen participation in China, focusing not merely on legal analysis, but also on the ways in which the legal framework influenced and was influenced in turn by social and economic developments. The principal emphasis is on ways in which the Chinese people—as opposed to high-ranking officials or cadres—have been able to play a part in the social and economic development of China through the associations in which they participateCivil Society in China sums up this rather complex journey through Chinese legal, social, and political history by assessing the ways in which social, economic, and legal system reforms in today’s China are bound to have an impact on civil society. The changes that have occurred in China’s civil society since the late 1980’s and, most especially, since the late 1990’s, are nothing short of remarkable. This volume is an essential guide for lawyers and scholars seeking an in depth understanding of social life in China written by one of its leading experts. —Oxford University Press

Putin: Snowden Still At Airport, Won’t Be Extradited

Kathy Lally, Anthony Faiola
Washington Post
Putin said Snowden arrived in Moscow unexpectedly and had committed no crime in Russia. He has not crossed into a part of the airport that requires him to show his passport to Russian authorities. Because Russia does not have an extradition...

China and U.S. War Over Snowden, but No Lasting Damage Seen

Sui-Lee Wee
Reuters
"China does not want this to affect the overall situation, the central government has always maintained a relatively calm and restrained attitude because Sino-U.S. relations are important," said Zhao Kejing, a professor of international...

China Brushes Aside U.S. Warnings on Snowden

Jane Perlez
New York Times
In Beijing, people with knowledge of how China handled Mr. Snowden’s exit from Hong Kong were claiming a tactical victory for China, saying that the government had acted in China’s best interests, and in the long-term interests of its relationship...

Conversation

06.25.13

How Badly Have Snowden’s Leaks Hurt U.S.-China Relations?

Matt Schiavenza
Matt Schiavenza:In the understatement of the day, the United States is unhappy with the recent developments of the Edward Snowden situation. Just three days ago, Washington was in negotiations with Hong Kong to file a warrant for Snowden's...

Snowden Sought Booz Allen Job to Gather Evidence on NSA Surveillance

Lana Lam
South China Morning Post
For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programmes ahead of planned leaks to the media. “My position with...

China Said to Have Made Call to Let Leaker Depart

Jane Perlez, Keith Bradsher
New York Times
From China’s point of view, analysts said, the departure of Mr. Snowden solved two concerns: how to prevent Beijing’s relationship with the United States from being ensnared in a long legal wrangle in Hong Kong over Mr. Snowden, and how to deal with...

Beijing Police Seek ‘Large and Vicious’ Suspects (With Wet Noses)

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
Police in Beijing are enforcing a longstanding ban on dogs taller than 13.7 inches in the districts that make up the heart of the capital. Officials note that rabies last year killed 13 people in Beijing, more than double the number in 2011. Big...

Environment

06.20.13

China’s GM Soybean Imports Stir Up Controversy

from chinadialogue
Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, has been awash with criticisms of the Ministry of Agriculture’s decision to green light imports of three more strains of genetically modified (GM) soybeans. A picture&nbsp...

Chinese State Media Warns Against Extradition of Edward Snowden

Heather Saul
Independent
 Chinese newspaper, The Global Times published an article calling for China to “safeguard its interests”, describing extraditing Snowden back to the US as a “betrayal of Snowden’s trust.” The editorial published...

Caixin Media

06.18.13

Will Bond Market Tidying Trigger Clean Sweep?

China’s financial regulators are rewriting rules for the interbank bond market after criminal investigations early this year led to the arrests of several well-known bond traders and exposed serious flaws in the market’s supervision system.The...

Johnson & Johnson is Treating Chinese Customers Like “Second-Class” Citizens, Say The Chinese Media

Gwynn Guilford
Quartz
While Johnson & Johnson has held 51 global product recalls since 2005, China has been excluded from 48 of them, according to Xinhua. "Any drugs recalled outside China must be recalled in China as well," the China...

China’s Jailed Nobel’s Wife Writes Open Letter to Chinese Leader to Protest Brother’s Sentence

Washington Post
In the letter, Liu Xiaobo’s wife Liu Xia said the sentencing was unfair and urged Xi to govern China in a way that respects the rights of individuals and avoids “ruthless suppression based on violence.”  

Ex-N.S.A. Contractor’s Disclosures May Draw China’s Attention

Keith Bradsher
New York Times
The decision by a former National Security Agency contractor to divulge classified data about the U.S. government’s surveillance of computers in mainland China and Hong Kong has complicated his legal position, but may also make China’s security...

Online Furor as Prosecutors Recommend ‘Leniency’ for Chinese Rail Boss

Liz Carter
Over the past 24 hours, the most viral post on Sina Weibo, has been a revelation that prosecutors advised that Liu Zhijun be given a “lenient sentence,” despite his admitted accumulation of 374 houses and over US$100...

Q&A: Edward Snowden and Hong Kong's Asylum Laws

Professor Simon N. M. Young
South China Morning Post
There has been feverish speculation in recent days over the legal framework surrounding surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden and his presence in Hong Kong. Here, Professor Simon N.M. Young, director of the University of Hong Kong's Centre...

Media

06.11.13

Chinese Web Users React to U.S. National Security Agency Surveillance Program

The online reactions to the PRISM incident, in which the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been revealed to conduct a far-ranging surveillance program affecting many both in the U.S. and abroad, have been as fascinating as the event itself...

Liu Zhijun Admits to Taking 64.6 Mln Yuan in Bribes

Wang Chen
The bribery charges involved securing favors for 11 people over the course of 25 years in project bidding, promotions and allocation of rail transport quotas. The court session ended in three and half hours without specifying a sentencing...

Media

06.03.13

Online Outrage After Chinese City Proposes Fine on Single Mothers

Women giving birth out of wedlock in China have to contend with family pressure, social stigma, and financial hardship. Now, some of them may have to pay a hefty fine as well.Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million people in Central China, posted a...

Reports

06.01.13

Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet

John D. Negroponte, Samuel J. Palmisano, Adam Segal
Council on Foreign Relations
The Task Force recognizes that there are both considerable opportunities and perilous challenges in cyberspace. This report identifies guiding principles and makes policy recommendations to mobilize a coalition of old friends and rising cyber powers...

Sinica Podcast

05.31.13

The Abuse of Children

Jeremy Goldkorn, Leta Hong Fincher & more from Sinica Podcast
{vertical_photo_right} After a few weeks grousing about the state of Chinese humor, sex, and Bill Bishop, we turn our gaze to the plight of the nation’s children, and the stories of child abuse and maltreatment which have filled the mainland...

Media

05.28.13

Trending on Weibo: #AIDSPatientsCanBeTeachers#

In the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, carriers of the AIDS virus are now allowed to teach schoolchildren. The recently-announced change in regulations marks a step forward for AIDS activists, with the hashtag #AIDSPatientsCanBeTeachers# now...

Daughter of a Detained Chinese Rights Activist Speaks

Didi Kristen Tatlow
New York Times
Liao Minyue last saw her mother, the rights activist Liu Ping, in mid-April 2013. “I’m afraid she’ll be beaten. It has happened before,” Ms. Liao, 20, said by telephone. “Now I’m waiting for any news of her trial. I’ll fight for her freedom...

Conversation

05.21.13

U.S.-China Economic Relations—What Will the Next Decade Bring?

Orville Schell & Patrick Chovanec
On Monday, within hours of the announcement that Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet U.S. President Barack Obama on a visit to California on June 7-8, Tung Chee-hwa, the former Chief Executive and President of the Executive Council of Hong Kong,...

Caixin Media

05.20.13

Errors of Aggression Catch up with Underwriter

Ping An Securities Co. has been slapped with a fine by the securities regulator and will lose its stock underwriting license for three months because of its sloppy work in underwriting the initial public offering of a company that turned out to be a...

China Investigates Director Alleged To Have 7 Kids

Associated Press
Reports circulated online this week that Zhang Yimou has seven children from his two marriages and from relationships with two other women in violation of the country’s strict family planning laws. 

Why China Executes So Many People

Zi Heng Lim
Atlantic
While anti-death penalty activists say public education is needed to get the message out, they believe change ultimately needs to come from the top -- something that they're not optimistic about at all. 

In China, Power Is Arrogant

Yu Hua
New York Times
The wacky and arbitrary nature of some rules, regulations and laws imposed by the local and national governments recently demonstrates the arrogance of power in China.  

S.P.C. Directive on Handling Suits Related to Internet “Management”

Siweiluozi
Siweiluozi’s Blog
A translation of a directive that reveals, among other things, just how many layers of oversight, guidance, and coordination Chinese courts are subject to. 

Conversation

05.14.13

Why Can’t China Make Its Food Safe?—Or Can It?

Alex Wang, John C. Balzano & more
The month my wife and I moved to Beijing in 2004, I saw a bag of oatmeal at our local grocery store prominently labeled: “NOT POLLUTED!” How funny that this would be a selling point, we thought.But 7 years later as we prepared to return to the US,...

Reports

05.14.13

“Swept Away”: Abuses Against Sex Workers in China

Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch believes the Chinese government should take immediate steps to protect the human rights of all people who engage in sex work. It should repeal the host of laws and regulations that are repressive and misused by the police, and end...