A Chinese court in Chongqing convicted 18 people on Tuesday of running a nearly $10 billion money-smuggling ring, according to an attorney involved, giving Chinese officials one of their biggest victories yet in their efforts to stop the illegal flow of funds.
Hurtling beneath the ground, there are sturdy new subways coursing through every major urban center of China like an electric current of modernity. The country's rapid urbanization in a matter of mere decades has produced engineering marvels that will be held up in the future as feats of fortitude and ingenuity.
What sells in China? The answer may be poised for a change. Advertising on the mainland has traditionally been about volume: loud, busy, and overwhelming. (One study found that the average Shanghai resident is exposed to three times as many ads on a typical day as someone in Britain.) But when the global advertising business handed out awards last month at the annual Cannes Lions festival, one of the biggest prizes went to a surprising winner, the obscure twenty-year-old student artist from Hong Kong named Jonathan Mak Long. He had designed a serene outdoor ad for Coca-Cola, and the path that led him to the stage in France was no less surprising: after Steve Jobs died, last October, Mak dreamed up a little tribute—an Apple symbol subtly embedded with Jobs’s silhouette—and the image went viral. It caught the attention of Graham Fink, the chief creative officer at Ogilvy & Mather China, who then hired the student to come up with an ad for Coke in China. He did so—and the result was better than Fink or anyone possibly expected. I asked Mak a few questions about what makes heads turn in China.
Nicholas R. Lardy assesses the latest Chinese economic output numbers, which show that a drop in exports and housing investment are contributing to slower growth.
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The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution devoted to the rigorous and intellectually open study of international economic policy. Since 1981, we have identified and analyzed a wide range of international economic challenges, policy approaches, and practical ideas to help make globalization beneficial and sustainable for the people of the United States and the world.
The frothy contemporary-art scene here has lost some of its ebullience in the three and a half months since a German art handler and a Chinese associate were detained on charges that they undervalued imported art to avoid customs duties.
Wages are still climbing rapidly in China and many companies are having trouble filling jobs despite the sharp economic slowdown here—evidence of a structural shortage in the labor market that may help China adjust to slower growth without political instability and whet consumer appetites for foreign goods.
Last week, the government of the Philippines announced plans to allocate nearly $12 million towards contraceptive supplies for community clinics. Yesterday, the London Summit on Family Planning brought together government leaders, representatives from international agencies and civil society organizations, and private donors as part of a campaign to improve access to birth control in the world’s poorest countries. In China, the story was dramatically different. Last Thursday, fifteen prominent Chinese legal and demographic scholars issued an open letter calling for the end of restrictions on people’s birth rights. The action was prompted by news reports that local government officials in northwest China forced a seven-month pregnant woman, Feng Jianmei, to undergo an abortion.
Tricia Wang may hold the record for most Instagram photos taken on Chinese trains. A sociologist, ethnographer, and corporate consultant who studies global technology use among migrants, low-income people, youth, and others on society’s fringes, Wang has worked for the past several years in China. Since 2005, she’s crisscrossed the country--often riding the rails--observing the impact of digital technology on the lives of rural workers migrating into the cities, and more recently, documenting the wildfire spread of new social-media platforms like Weibo and Renren. Recharging at her home base in Brooklyn after a year away, Wang spoke with Fast Company about her field of digital ethnography, the benefits of working outside of big institutions, and what U.S. tech entrepreneurs can learn from their peers in China.
Yu Jie is one of China’s most prominent essayists and critics, with more than thirty books to his name. His latest work is a biography of his friend, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, that was published in Chinese in Hong Kong a few weeks ago. It is not the first time he has stirred up controversy in China. Yu first gained fame in 1998 at age twenty-five for his book Fire and Ice, a series of biting, satirical essays on contemporary society. Within two years, he was already blacklisted by most publishers. An intensely moralistic person, he also angered many Chinese intellectuals for arguing that they failed to match actions to words.
