Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping after an escalation in bilateral tensions since China’s declaration last month of an air-defense zone that overlaps with Japan’s over the East China Sea.
The story of self-censorship in China is a quieter tale of unwritten articles, avoided topics and careful phrasing.
Chinese journalists get an open door to the United States. This reflects U.S. values and is fundamentally correct. If China continues to exclude and threaten American journalists, the U.S. should inject a little more symmetry into its visa policy.
No one seems to have measured exactly how old Chinese civilization is, but Endymion Wilkinson can probably give a more precise answer than anyone else. “1.6 billion minutes separate us from the Zhou conquest of the Shang,” he informs us at the beginning of his Chinese History: A New Manual. Undaunted, he then sets out to describe just about everything that has happened since.
In November, the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) Fuzheng Huayu Tablets passed the second phase of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) clinical testing.
Before this, only one TCM drug had cleared the second of the three phases needed for a medicine to hit the U.S. market. That was Compound Salvia Droplet Pills (CDSP), made by the Tasly Group of Tianjin. CDSP has still not passed FDA’s third phase.
This means that no compound TCM drug has entered mainstream U.S. medical markets.
Some two dozen journalists employed by The New York Times and Bloomberg News have not yet received the visas they need to continue to report and live in China after the end of this year. Without them, they will effectively be expelled from the country. Visiting Beijing earlier this week, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden met reporters from The Times and Bloomberg and told them he had raised the issue in his meeting with China’s top leaders. Next week in Washington, U.S. lawmakers will hold a roundtable under the auspices of the Congressional Executive Commission on China to discuss China’s treatment of the foreign press. We asked contributors to react to this news and suggest how the United States should respond.
“You are nothing without your motherland.” It’s a trite phrase, one that seems unlikely to stir the blood of even the most dyed-in-the-wool nationalist—but it has found recent currency in China. An essay with that title has been making the rounds on the Chinese Internet since mid-November; it then went viral in early December, with state media giving the rant widespread play.
In September, an unusual environmental organization was launched in one of the most ancient and significant sites in China—the Songyang Academy, Dengfeng, Henan. Founded in the eleventh century AD, this was one of the four Confucian Academies of China. The site was originally Buddhist; it became Daoist in the early seventh century, and Confucian in 1035.
All of that is but a footnote in history compared with the two ancient pine trees on the site, which were already so venerated in 110 BC that Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty went there to worship them.
In the mid-1950s, when I was a graduate student of Chinese history, the Manchu Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) was invariably condemned as a reactionary hate figure; Mao Zedong was admired. In the textbooks of that time, leading American scholars characterized Cixi as cruel, imperious, and opposed to the Westernizing reforms championed by progressive officials, all of whom were Han Chinese. Those reformers, we learned, were unlike the ruling Manchus, who had conquered China in 1644 and were struggling brutally to preserve their crumbling empire.
In her one-bedroom apartment, Dr. Gao Yaojie — known to many as “the AIDS Granny” — moves with great difficulty through her tidy clutter and stacks of belongings. In the small kitchen, she stirs a pot of rice and bean porridge, one of the few things she can digest. She lost most of her stomach in surgery after a suicide attempt four decades ago and suffered multiple beatings during the Cultural Revolution.
