A Wrinkle to Those Hot Chinese Tech IPOs
Sizing up the U.S. Shares of Sina Weibo and Alibaba? Better Learn Your Way Around a Variable Interest Entity
on March 26, 2014
Investors, ready your wallets.
Stagnant Water & Other Poems by Wen Yiduo
on March 26, 2014
On June 6, 1946, at 5pm, after stepping out of the office of the Democratic Weekly, Wen Yiduo died in a hail of bullets. Mao blamed the Nationalists and transformed Wen into a paragon of the revolution.
Wen was born into a well-to-do family in Hubei, China, and received a classical education. But he came of age as old imperial China and its institutions were being swept away, and the Chinese people were looking ahead to a new China. It was fertile ground for a young poet.
In 1922, Wen came to the U.S. and studied art and literature at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was during this period that his first collection of poetry was published, Hongzu or “Red Candle.” He returned to China in 1925 and took a position as a university professor and became active in the political and aesthetic debates of the time. His second collection of poems, Sishui, rendered by previous translators as “Dead Water,” was published in 1928.
As political trends shifted from an intellectual, elitist base toward a populist one, changes in literature were just as pervasive. Wen was one of the leaders of a movement to reform Chinese poetry—hitherto written in a classical style with a diction and rhetoric so far removed from everyday usage that it had segregated itself from all but the wealthy and the well educated—by adapting common speech and direct observation, while maintaining a strict, albeit new, formalism.
However, Wen never resolved the conflicts that existed within him: The elitist and the proletarian, the scholar and the activist, the traditionalist and the innovator, the personal man and the public man, fought for ascendancy. Yet it was these contradictions that proved so fruitful and give his poetry its singular power. —Bright City Books
Book Review:
David Bandurski
on March 26, 2014
David Bandurski is the Executive Director of the China Media Project, an independent research project studying the Chinese media landscape both within the People’s Republic of China and globally. He is also a co-founder of Decoding China, an online guide to understanding the official Chinese meaning of key terms in international relations and development cooperation. In addition to his regular writing and analysis at the China Media Project, Bandurski has been a contributor to Brookings, The New York Times, The Guardian, Index on Censorship, ChinaFile, The Diplomat, and other publications. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village: And Other Tales from the Back Alleys of Urbanising China, a book of reportage about urbanization in China, and co-author of Investigative Journalism in China, a book of eight cases on Chinese watchdog journalism.
China, We Fear You
on March 25, 2014
On March 18, thousands of students began a sit-in of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan in the capital, Taipei, a historic first that has paralyzed the island’s lawmaking body. Students have amassed to protest an attempt by the Kuomintang, the island’s ruling party, to push through a trade pact with China.
State-Owned Oil Firms Invite Outside Investors
Sinopec and China National Petroleum Corp Follow Central Government Calls For Reform
on March 25, 2014
Since February, state-owned oil majors have taken steps toward pilots in mixed-share ownership, following central government calls for reforms to state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
After the Chinese New Year, China Petroleum and Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) announced plans to restructure its sales assets, estimated to be worth over 300 billion yuan, to introduce non-state investors in a mixed-ownership pilot in which not less than 30 percent of shares of a new company will be offered to investors.
Eric Fish
on March 25, 2014
Eric Fish is the author of the book China’s Millennials: The Want Generation. From 2007 to 2014, he was based in China where he worked for the Economic Observer and contributed to outlets including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, and The Telegraph, among others.
Urban China
Toward Efficient, Inclusive, and Sustainable Urbanization
on March 25, 2014
This report recommends that China curb rapid urban sprawl by reforming land requisition, give migrants urban residency and equal access to basic public services, and reform local finances by finding stable revenues and by allowing local governments to borrow directly within strict central rules.
As China’s people are increasingly concentrated in cities, with 200 million more urban dwellers than a decade ago, the government needs to strengthen the enforcement of environmental legislation and reduce the number of pollution-related health problems, according to the joint report by the World Bank and the Development Research Center of China’s State Council.
The report was prepared over the last 14 months and the interim reports were shared on a continuous basis with China’s top policymakers as input to the government’s policy discussions on urbanization, providing an important basis for the formulation of policies on China’s new model of urbanization.
The report includes six priority areas for a new model of urbanization:
- Reforming land management and institutions.
- Reforming the hukou household-registration system to provide equal access to quality services for all citizens and create a more mobile and versatile labor force.
- Placing urban finances on a more sustainable footing, while creating financial discipline for local governments.
- Reforming urban planning and design.
- Managing environmental pressures.
- Improving local governance.
Topics:
Urban Life
Organization:
World Bank
We Will Make You Learn to Love Baijiu
on March 24, 2014
Forget our complaints about the pollution, China has an even more intractable public relations problem that has everything to do with the country’s favorite hard liquor. And yes, we are talking about baijiu. In 1854, French Catholic missionary Régis Huc introduced the drink to Western civilization as “absolutely like liquid fire,” while Dan Rather—covering Nixon’s seminal 1972 trip to China—compared it to “liquid razor blades.”
Chinese Atheists? What the Pew Survey Gets Wrong
on March 24, 2014
Earlier this month, I came across a fascinating opinion survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. The report asked people in forty countries whether belief in God is necessary for morality. Mostly, the results aren’t surprising. In advanced democracies, such as those in Western Europe, people say by at least a two-to-one margin that morality is not linked to belief in God—presumably, they think non-believers in God can be moral.
“We’ll Know It When We’re There”
A Q&A with Martin Johnson of greatfire.org
on March 21, 2014
Martin Johnson (not his real name), is a co-founder of the China-based Internet freedom advocacy collective GreatFire.org. On the condition that he not be photographed, he gave the following interview to ChinaFile at an outdoor cafe in Manhattan.
Jonathan Landreth: You've been in China, somewhere, for a while. How long?
