• ‘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>>

  • (AFP/Getty Images)

    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>>

  • Liu Jin—AFP/Getty Images

    ‘A Nation Was Forged by Literary Writers’

    An Excerpt from Granta 169: CHINA

    Thomas Meaney via Granta

    This year, I returned to a Beijing I hardly recognized. It was not the capital I first glimpsed as a child in the 1980s, when groups of men in thin jackets stood smoking in the cold, and tides of cyclists seemed ready to carry me away. Nor was it the city of the 1990s, when the muzak of Kenny G poured out of the loudspeakers of Tiananmen Square, or the Beijing of Hu Jintao, when frat boys drank themselves into oblivion under the green skies of Sanlitun, while in hotel ballrooms Western... Read full story>>

  • Jeffrey Prescott

    Xi vs. Xu: Two Visions for China’s Future

    Teng Biao & Jerome A. Cohen

    In late October, Radio Free Asia reported that Chinese civil rights advocate and lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who is serving a 14-year sentence for state subversion, has been hunger striking to protest the conditions of his incarceration. Xu’s imprisonment stems from his vision for China’s future. At a moment when his situation seems particularly dire, it’s worth tracing how his story intersects with and diverges from that of Xi Jinping, the man whose vision for China is responsible for Xu’s captivity. Read full story>>

  • Elsa Ruiz for Asia Society

    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>>

  • Kevin Frayer—Getty Images

    How Much Will New Stimulus Improve China’s Economic Outlook?

    A ChinaFile Conversation

    Arthur R. Kroeber, Michael Pettis & more via ChinaFile Conversation

    After months of downbeat economic news and little action from the Chinese government, Beijing has announced a slew of stimulus measures. Are the stimulus measures enough to make a difference and are they going to work as long as secular trends like demographics and global uncertainty don’t change? What signal should we look for to understand if the stimulus measures will work? How will China’s economy perform in the next year? Read full story>>

  • Aaron Tam—AFP/Getty Images

    China’s Iconoclast

    Ian Johnson via New York Review of Books

    I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo by Perry Link, the leading Western chronicler of dissent in China, and a Chinese colleague who writes anonymously as Wu Dazhi is the definitive biography of the most famous dissident in the nearly seventy-five-year history of the People’s Republic of China. The book, long and necessarily ambitious, is also a tour de force survey of Chinese political thought, activism, and dissent over the past half-century. Read full story>>

Recent Stories

Viewpoint

10.16.24

Where the Malan Blooms

Yangyang Cheng
This October 16 marks the 60th anniversary of the testing of the first Chinese nuclear bomb. When my friends and I coiled up our jump ropes and returned to class, we learned inspirational tales about the earliest generation of Chinese nuclear...

Conversation

10.04.24

Tick Tock for TikTok

Kevin Xu, Ivy Yang & more
Will TikTok succeed in defending itself on First Amendment grounds, or will it be forced to shut down in the U.S.? Or will ByteDance find a creative way out of the problem? What will this case mean for Chinese business interests in the U.S. and the...

Features

09.27.24

Is China’s Cultural Outreach to Muslims in Indonesia Working?

Randy Mulyanto
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. So as Beijing ramps up its engagement with the Global South and with the Muslim world, it is unsurprising that it has been reaching out to various Muslim organizations and strengthening its...

Features

09.26.24

Can China’s Scholarships and Cultural Diplomacy Efforts Succeed in Pakistan?

Akbar Notezai
In Washington, D.C., China has a bad reputation for the way it treats its Muslim minorities. But views differ greatly in many majority-Muslim countries in Asia. Educational programs and exchanges are a key part of this. Pakistan is an exemplar:...

Viewpoint

09.26.24

How a Crackdown Transformed LGBTQ Activism in China

Darius Longarino
In 2020, events took a turn. Soon after wrapping up Pride Month festivities, Shanghai Pride announced it was ending its 12-year run. Organizers soon revealed the reason for the closure was that they no longer felt safe under intensifying harassment...

From Wild Exuberance to State Control in China’s Art Market

Jeremy Goldkorn & Kejia Wu
The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a fascinating book that examines the relationship between the Chinese government’s push for cultural “soft power” and its desire for control. In the book,...

Viewpoint

09.12.24

Southeast Asia Doesn’t Want to Choose between China and the U.S.

Bryanna Entwistle
If history provides a guide to the future, upholding human rights will continue to be sidelined in the U.S.’ Southeast Asia policy, and priority will be given to relationships and policies that benefit the U.S. as it seeks to build leverage over...

Conversation

08.19.24

What to Make of China’s Moves in the Middle East

Carice Witte, Joyce Karam & more
What does Beijing expect to gain from the intra-Palestinian peace talks? What considerations shape China’s position on the Israel-Gaza conflict, and on the wider geopolitical picture of the Middle East? How does China’s support for Iran factor into...

Media

11.01.23

ChinaFile Presents: China Reporting in Exile

Annie Jieping Zhang, Li Yuan & more
ChinaFile and The New York Review of Books co-hosted a panel discussion with Chinese journalists working from abroad. Participants included reporter, editor, and digital media entrepreneur Annie Jieping Zhang, New York Times columnist Li Yuan,...

Explore the Site

The New York Review of Books China Archive

from New York Review of Books
Welcome to the New York Review of Books China Archive, a collaborative project of ChinaFile.org and The New York Review of Books. In the archive you will find a compilation of full-length essays and book reviews on China dating from the Review'...

Photography & Video

Photo Gallery

07.24.19

‘I Love HK but Hate It at the Same Time’

Todd R. Darling
A central issue many of the Hong Kong people in my portraits are wrestling with is how to define an identity and being challenged in that pursuit by cultural, social, or political pressures. There is a lot of frustration and anger over the recent...

Books

Books

03.12.20

China and Intervention at the UN Security Council

Courtney J. Fung
Oxford University Press: What explains China’s response to intervention at the UN Security Council? China and Intervention at the UN Security Council argues that status is an overlooked determinant in understanding its decisions, even in the apex cases that are shadowed by a public discourse calling for foreign-imposed regime change in Sudan, Libya, and Syria. It posits that China reconciles its status dilemma as it weighs decisions to intervene, seeking recognition from both its intervention peer groups of great powers and developing states. Understanding the impact and scope of conditions of status answers why China has taken certain positions regarding intervention and how these positions were justified. Foreign policy behavior that complies with status, and related social factors like self-image and identity, means that China can select policy options bearing material costs. China and Intervention at the UN Security Council draws on an extensive collection of data, including over two hundred interviews with UN officials and Chinese foreign policy elites, participant observation at UN Headquarters, and a dataset of Chinese-language analysis regarding foreign-imposed regime change and intervention. The book concludes with new perspectives on the malleability of China’s core interests, insights about the application of status for cooperation, and the implications of the status dilemma for rising powers.{chop}

Books

03.24.20

Vernacular Industrialism in China

Eugenia Lean
Columbia University Press: In early 20th-century China, Chen Diexian (1879-1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters, captain of industry, magazine editor, and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early 20th-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the 21st century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.{chop}

Notes from ChinaFile

From Wild Exuberance to State Control in China’s Art Market

Jeremy Goldkorn & Kejia Wu
The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a fascinating book that examines the relationship between the Chinese government’s push for cultural “soft power” and its desire for control. In the book,...

35 Years Later: A Retrospective of Our Work on the 1989 Tiananmen Protests and Crackdown

This year is the 35th anniversary of the 1989 mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and elsewhere around China, and their brutal suppression on June 4. The memories of these events are receding into the past, a process greatly aided in...