U.S. and China Just Set New Road Rules for Science Collaboration. Americans Will Benefit If We Don't Scrap Joint Research

Brendan Kelly & Jing Qian via Foreign Policy

Amid heightened U.S.-China strategic and technology competition, bilateral scientific collaboration has become increasingly challenging. China’s broad military-civil fusion and espionage efforts have heightened Washington’s concerns that any collaboration could be exploited to advance Beijing’s military development. China’s increasingly closed information environment has also exacerbated doubts around whether the results and benefits of collaboration will be properly shared.In this environment... Read full story>>

The Tibetan Government-in-Exile Has a New Strategy

Robert Barnett

An unexpected development has taken place in the seven-decades-long dispute between the Tibetan exile leadership and China’s government. In early July, for the first time since 2010, Chinese authorities reportedly held direct talks with the exile Tibetan political leadership, based in Dharamsala, India. The meeting in July followed a year or more of back-channel contacts of some kind.These talks are at only a very preliminary stage and may not last. Beijing has not confirmed that it has had... Read full story>>

Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

Part II

Zha Jianying

6.For educated Chinese people, the late 1910s and early 1920s was a period of intense ideological exploration and political agitation. Both inside and outside China, all sorts of groups were vying to influence the minds of China’s future élite. The Chinese student communities in France were no exception.The “Diligent Work and Frugal Study in France Movement” (留法勤工俭学运动), or “Work Study Movement,” was originally launched by a group of Chinese anarchists as a scheme both to enable Chinese students... Read full story>>

Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

Part I

Zha Jianying

Every morning, I crossed a stretch of railway tracks on the way to my school. The tracks lay less than a hundred meters from the school gate, and a train often appeared in the late afternoon just as we were discharged. Sometimes it was a freight train piled high with lumber or coal. It would be gliding along, clink clank, clink clank, at low speed because it was getting near its destination. Not far beyond the road bend was a timber mill and a coal plant, where logs and the coal would be... Read full story>>

ChinaFile Presents: ‘Her Lotus Year,’ a Conversation with Paul French

Paul French & Jeremy Goldkorn

Paul French is a prolific author of books on pre-revolutionary 20th Century China and the stories of foreigners who lived and worked there, including the bestselling true-crime history, Midnight in Peking. His work is based on traditional historical research, his own experiences living in Shanghai for around two decades, and correspondence and conversations with people who lived in China, and their family members. His latest book is about the yearlong sojourn of American socialite... Read full story>>

‘What Happened, Mama? In 1989, Were You Just Like Me?’

An’an

Two things motivated me to come to the U.S. for college in 2021. I believed in the fourth estate and wanted to become an investigative journalist, and I knew China had no space for speaking truth to power. I also wanted to run away from my family, especially my mother. And yet, in the fall of 2023, I found myself returning to China on a gap year. Read full story>>

ChinaFile Presents: ‘Nikah,’ a Film Screening and Discussion

Mukaddas Mijit, Bastien Ehouzan & more

The film ‘Nikah,’ set in China’s Uyghur region in 2017, spans the months between two weddings. It follows Dilber, a young woman approaching a crossroads amid the Chinese government’s surveilling and detaining of members of her community. As even her most personal decisions become suddenly political, Dilber must struggle with the tension between tradition and modernity, as her world closes in around her. Co-directors Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan were in conversation with ChinaFile Senior... Read full story>>