This is the first of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts two and three.
Rana Mitter is Deutsche Bank Director of the University China Centre at the University of Oxford, where he is Professor of History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University. His most recent book is Forgotten Ally: China's World War II 1937-1945 (titled China’s War with Japan, 1937-45 outside North America), which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, was named as a 2013 Book of the Year in the Financial Times and The Economist and was named a 2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is a regular presenter of the arts and ideas program "Free Thinking" on BBC Radio 3 in the U.K.
Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Trained at the University of Michigan and Columbia University (Ph.D., 1954), his main ethnographic experience and many of his writings concern Pacific Island peoples, their cultures, and their histories. Most particularly, he has worked extensively in the Fiji Islands and on the history of Hawai'i. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy and a former fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, he is the author of a number of books, including several on the nature of culture and the cultural varieties of history. Co-founder and Executive Director of Prickly Paradigm Press, he has also contributed two works to this pamphleteering enterprise, Waiting For Foucault, Still and The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Professor Sahlins taught at the University of Michigan from 1956 to 1973, and then at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1997.
Activists have accused Beijing of exaggerating the threat from Uighur separatists to justify a crackdown on the Uighurs’ religious and cultural freedoms.
When dissident author Murong Xuecun returns home, he says he will tell Beijing authorities they can come and get him.
Mary E. Gallagher is the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights Professor at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Director of the International Institute. She was the Director of the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies from 2008 to 2020. Gallagher’s most recent book is Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is also the author or editor of several other books, including Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton, 2005). Gallagher was a foreign student in China in the fall of 1989 at Nanjing University at the Duke-in-China Program. She taught at Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996 to 1997 as a member of the Princeton-in-Asia program. In 2023-2025, Gallagher is a Fulbright Global Scholar on a new research project that examines attitudes toward China in the United States, Germany, Japan, and South Korea. In addition to her academic research, she has consulted with governments, international organizations, and corporations on China’s domestic politics, labor and workplace conditions, and urbanization policies. She received her Ph.D. in Politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her B.A. from Smith College in 1991.
Lunch at Central Park's Loeb Boathouse is an elegant affair, popular among well-heeled tourists and alumni networking associations for its lakeside view and excellent service. But on Wednesday, June 25, the restaurant hosted hundreds of homeless people, dozens of journalists, several bodyguards watching over a silver case most likely filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, two badly disfigured survivors of self-immolation, and one Chen Guangbiao. A 45-year-old recycling tycoon and self-proclaimed "China's Top Philanthropist," Chen was in Manhattan to stage a charity event.
China has for the first time formally agreed to allow Indian hydrological experts to conduct study tours in Tibet to monitor the flows on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra, according to a new agreement signed here on Monday during the visit of Vice-President Hamid Ansari.
The Japanese government’s endorsing of a reinterpretation of its pacifist Constitution on Tuesday for the right to collective self-defense is a dangerous move that will lead to security worries for other Asian countries.
