Photo Gallery

The Xiao River rushes deep and clear out of the mountains of southern China into a narrow plain of paddies and villages. For several weeks in August 1967, more than nine thousand people were murdered in this region of Hunan province. Its epicenter...

Hong Kong photographer Billy H.C. Kwok was eight years old when the United Kingdom handed over control of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Growing up, Kwok witnessed British influence wane and China’s control grow. He has also watched the freedoms...

The French photographer Patrick Wack first traveled to Xinjiang in 2016. The pictures he made during those visits to Xinjiang between 2016 and 2019 document both the changes wrought by the government campaign of cultural and political repression of...

Dong told me he photographed Beijing last year for the simple reason of wanting to bear witness. Now, he hopes his photos can serve as a memorial to the immense distress and loss, a situation created by its own government’s compulsion for secrecy...

Maxine greets us from her small apartment, decorated with flowers and a poster of herself. “If you ask me whether I feel like this is Laos or China, I feel like I’m living in China. There are so many Chinese people here,” she says as she brushes her...

From Madoi county, a settlement near the headwaters of the Yellow River, our two-car convoy headed out to visit a desert Yang Yong had first viewed through binoculars in 1997. From the roadside, the geologist had seen a small, wind-blown patch of...

In September 2014, while waiting for access to photograph Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, a Chinese photographer who calls himself “Ali” came upon a large group of students from his home country at a local restaurant. He knew that many young Chinese...

Balloons over a wire fence, plastic toys hanging from a man-made rock, a few printed tiles on a wall, a pink sleep shirt with a sketch of a butterfly and dandelions: Peng’s photos capture the colorful glimmers of modest, unabashed desire. She seems...

“I never realized that so many Chinese people have tattoos,” says photographer Xu Song, who spent the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016 photographing people at outdoor swimming pools in Beijing with his phone. “When the clothes come off, the secrets...

On a chilly winter Friday in early 2013, seven-year-old Zou Yanhu came home from school, looking dejected. Yanhu was a first-grader attending a public primary school in Chengdu, Sichuan’s sprawling capital city. His weekend homework was to write...

In the 2000s, New York-based artist Lisa Ross traveled to the city of Turpan in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and photographed local people on the beds that they keep in their fields. The portraits in that series are currently on exhibit...

In the summer of 2014, Zhou Xiaoxuan, then a 21-year-old living in Beijing, filed a report with the local police. She described what had happened the previous day when she had delivered a basket of fruit to one of China’s most prominent news anchors...

2018 gave us many opportunities to look back at China’s past—the tenth anniversary of Sichuan earthquake and of the Beijing Olympics, the 40th year since the country began its policy of Reform and Opening. This year also brought changes that thrust...

U.S.-China trade is not merely a political question; it exists within a massive system that has been built over decades, the accretive results of countless choices by governments, businesses, consumers, and workers. It is at once a heaving,...

China’s rapid industrialization has both led to, and been driven by, resource cultivation and extraction of breathtaking scope. But what happens when the resources run out?For many Chinese cities, local natural resources are a wellspring of jobs,...

Zhang Xiaowu grew up and has lived his whole life in Rui’an, where he works as a full-time art teacher and a part-time documentary photographer. Located in China’s eastern coastal Zhejiang province, Rui’an used to be predominantly rural. In 1987, as...

The August 2015 Tianjin explosion claimed 173 lives, and the 24-year-old firefighter Pang Ti was one of them. That disaster at a chemical warehouse, caused by mismanagement and lax oversight, put his parents Pang Fangguo and Fang Zhiying among the...

“We were at an altitude of 15,000 feet on Mount Haizi. It started to hail. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees. We were only wearing t-shirts. They didn’t stop biking.” It was photographer Wang He’s second time on the Tibetan Plateau. The first...

“When I look back at 2017 in China, I see faces,” ChinaFile Visuals Editor Muyi Xiao says. “Some are ambitious, some are earnest, some are upset, some are lost, and some wear expressions I can’t put in words; their fates are intertwined with that of...

The Fei doctrine goes something like this: Chinese girls love Korean TV shows, saccharine melodramas like Boys Over Flowers or Hi! School: Love On, where men are romantics or rakes, and women are always drama queens. On screen, resistance is not...

This photo gallery is part of Tomoko Kikuchi’s “Drag Queens for the Dearly Departed,” a project she shot as an Abigail Cohen Fellow in Documentary Photography. Too see the other parts of this project, including an introductory essay by Ian Johnson,...

From the outside, the buildings with the bright tin roofs don’t look like places where money is made. High in the remote mountains of the region of China’s Sichuan province that borders Tibet, economic life has mostly centered on grazing and...

“I was supposed to be fighting some IT guy,” Bo Junhui groaned afterward. Instead, the 18-year-old student was up against someone a year older, ten pounds heavier, and a lot hungrier. Xia Tian has never worked behind a desk; he’d spent the last few...

In June 2015, a couple dozen China-based photographers—some Chinese, some not—founded the Instagram account Eyes on China. Their goal, as member photographer Gilles Sabrié put it, was to collectively create “a diverse, dynamic, and objective view”...

Walking onto the factory floor, one finds a busy scene amid the thundering of machines. Sections of wood are being turned into thin matchsticks, and as they pass through the noisy machines, each is topped with a “little red cap.” A group of women...

According to my caretakers at the orphanage, Chunchun arrived a few years before I did, when she was a baby. They estimate that I was around three or four years old at the time of my arrival, howling and screaming at the top of my lungs. I had been...

Punk, as with most modern Western rock music, took root in China abruptly and unevenly starting in the early 1990s. Beijing skinhead Ma Ke—pictured here with a teardrop temporary tattoo—was born in 1976, around the same time as punk itself. One of...

History has not favored power-sharing on the world’s most populated continent. For millennia, China dominated as East Asia’s greatest force, its culture shaping civilizations across the region. In a more recent era, Japan reigned, boasting the...

Mounds of sand sit beneath a row of pile drivers on Dadeng Island, where the Chinese city of Xiamen is building a new airport on reclaimed land.Syril Hung sighs, awe-struck by this scene. The retired editor is looking through a pair of binoculars...

Li Mingjin, a 38-year-old coal miner, worked hard and was the sole breadwinner for his family. For 19 years, he toiled deep in the belly of the earth beneath Shanxi province. But in November 2014, by the time he was diagnosed with lung cancer, he...

China’s economy is still growing. But its ascent is nothing like the period of double-digit growth during the first decade of this century. In the early aughts when the economy was soaring, Shanghai was the place that probably best embodied its...

Each March, some 5,000 delegates from across China gather in Beijing for the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s legislature, and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body...

It was at a small, off the record press dinner with a Hong Kong government officer not too long ago at the Summer Palace restaurant in the Shangri-la Hotel. The topic of the day, inevitably, came up for discussion: the minimum wage for domestic...

In certain parts of Yunnan province, in China’s southwest, marriage of boys and girls as young as 13 years old is a common phenomenon, practiced without taboo despite the nation’s rule requiring women to be 20 and men 22 before they marry...

Across the frozen Ussuri River that marked the boundary between China and Russia, two armies stared each other down. Soon they would clash, as they did almost every week, on the ice. The Chinese swung halberds and hooks; the Russians advanced like...

Nellie Shen, 73, has lived in the United States for years, but returned to Taiwan for the 2016 election on January 16.

Beginning in 1981 when it opened its doors in the Chinese city of Wuxi in Jiangsu province, the Big Paddy’s Edge Inn attracted some of the city’s most colorful characters. The inn’s proprietor, Gu Qimei, charged a rock-bottom nightly fee of 6 RMB—or...

When Deng Xiaoping ascended to the throne in late 1978 and then began to initiate a whole series of economic and political reforms that soon transformed the face of China, many people blithely assumed that time had come and gone for China’s...

Coal miners in Huaibei, in northern Anhui province, pose for photographer Xie Zhengyi, a member of the photo agency CPressphoto. This city of two million sits atop an estimated 2.726 million tons of coal, as well as other mineral reserves.China is...

In 1999, photographer Willem Wernsen spent ten days in the small city of Kengzi, in Guangdong province, about 30 miles northeast of Shenzhen in an industrial zone. This was part of a longer, five-week trip, Wernsen’s first to the People’s Republic...

This photo series of Chinese hairdressers was made in the spring of 2012, in the city center of Chengdu in Sichuan province. There, some 16 percent of the city’s nearly 12 million residents are recent immigrants, like the individuals photographed in...

It doesn’t matter how many times you tell the cook not to add hot peppers, anything you order in Chongqing is going to be mouth-numbing and hotter than anything you’ve ever tasted before. It will be good, but it will be hot. From hotpot joints and...

How one might best translate “Bling Dynasty” into Chinese, I have no real idea. (Maybe “A Possessor of Uncouth Wealth,” Tuhao wangchao (土豪王朝), “Era of Dazzlement,” Liangxia shidai (亮瞎时代), or even the more straightforward “Bling Dynasty,” Buling-...

In 2014, ChinaFile published great original work in photography. As always, we worked to look beyond stereotypical images of the country to find nuanced representations of the new and ChinaFile contributors’ commentary on it. Still, many of our...

This past July, Shanghai’s Huangpu River—known for more than a few incidents involving dead floating pigs—played host to artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s ark-like menagerie of decrepit animals, “The Ninth Wave.” The vessel was destined for the Power Station...

As thousands of people remain on the streets of Hong Kong, even after local police tried to disperse their protests with hoses and tear gas, here is a collection of images of how the protests—that are calling for greater democracy in Hong Kong—have...

When the first U.S. President visited China, he was no longer president. Ulysses S. Grant traveled in Asia in 1879. The Qing empire was embroiled in a dispute with Japan over territorial claims to the Ryuku Islands and wanted the U.S. to mediate...

My first trip to Xinjiang was in 1995; it was also my first trip to China. The UN’s World Conference on Women was taking place in Beijing and I could only manage to secure a visa for China on the condition that I would not go to Beijing (the...

As the World Cup draws to a close, we present a photo essay by Chinese photographer Zhang Xinmin exploring the game of soccer along the Silk Road in Xinjiang, where it has a special place in Uighur education and culture. China’s forays into...

It’s a feature of the landscape one sees throughout China. On the sides of roads, at the edges of construction sites, on the steep banks of rivers, and in pastures that wrap around the fat pylons of future highways, Chinese people are farming,...

The wedding banquet comes later. For many Chinese couples, married life really begins in the photo studio where, basted in glitter and hair gel, the brides dressed for a debut at La Scala or night out with Fabio, they gaze upon sets so tufted and...

Nine years ago, photographer Katharina Hesse began to make portraits of North Korean defectors. To protect their identities, she allows them to conceal their faces, asking only that they “give something” of themselves to the photographs. And they do...

Hong Kong rose up as the essential gateway into Communist China over the second half of the twentieth century—a British-run laissez-faire playground whose bottom-line pragmatism proved lucrative for all, maintaining a fluid, delicate balance between...

Decades of unprecedented economic growth have affected the lives of more than a generation of mainland Chinese and reshaped the urban structure of cities. China has become one of the most exciting and permissive places in the world to practice...

Tucked amidst the factories and shops of of the Longgang district of the southern boomtown of Shenzhen sits a handful of narrow Qing Dynasty lanes collectively called Wuwucun, after the original Hakka minority Wu clan who established the village in...