It just got slightly less difficult to be a clean Chinese official. State media reported on January 20 that Chinese civil servants had received their first pay raise in ten years, a move that includes a 60 percent bump for President Xi Jinping and the six men who serve with him on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee.
We’ve faulted President Obama for his less-than-full-throated support of free-trade agreements that enjoy the nominal backing of his administration. There was no such cause for complaint about his State of the Union address Tuesday night, however, in which he called on “both parties to give me trade promotion authority to protect American workers with strong new trade deals from Asia to Europe.”
Two Chinese oil companies show contrasting approaches in their attempts to operate in the South China Sea where, to the discomfort of its smaller neighbours, China’s claims in disputed waters have grown increasingly assertive.
As air pollution once more soared to hazardous levels last week in Beijing, in Washington a panel of Chinese and other international experts explained some of the solutions to taking cars off the roads in the world’s most populous country, but there are few easy answers.
The number of strikes more than doubled in 2014 to 1,378 from 656 the year before, according to China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group. April saw the biggest strike in decades, when about 40,000 employees of Adidas and Nike supplier Yue Yuen went on strike to demand social insurance payments.
In 1991, Deng Xiaoping famously explained that in order to reassure the world of its peaceful intentions, China should “cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.” Since then, China’s reassurance strategy has evolved as its economic clout and military capabilities have become impossible to mask, and its participation in global governance has become unavoidable.
Lauren Greenfield is an acclaimed photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her photographic work "Fast Forward," "Girl Culture," and "THIN" explore youth culture, wealth, gender, beauty, and body image. The three bodies of work were published as three monographs with the same names, exhibited worldwide, and are in many museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston).
She is the recipient of numerous photography awards and grants, including the ICP Infinity Award for Young Photographer (1997), the Art Directors Club Gold Cube for Photography (2011), a National Geographic Grant, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant, the People's Choice Award at the Moscow Biennial, and the NPPA Community Awareness Award.
Having co-directed a short documentary film about Irish undocumented immigrants in Boston in her undergraduate years in the late 1980s, Greenfield had her feature-length documentary film debut with "THIN" in 2006. In the film, she embarks on an emotional journey through the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Florida, a residential facility dedicated to the treatment of eating disorders. Greenfield’s follow-up documentary short film, "kids + money," is a conversation with young people from diverse Los Angeles communities about the role of money in their lives. In 2011, Greenfield was commissioned by The Annenberg Space for Photography to produce a documentary short, "Beauty CULTure," which is a critical examination of the narrowing definition of beauty and the influence of media messages on the female body image in contemporary society. In 2012, she received the Sundance Film Festival U.S. Directing Award: Documentary for her documentary film "The Queen of Versailles," which went on to win many awards and nominations.
"China scares me," he said Tuesday at the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong. "It scares me not because the policies have been wrong or anything, but because of the magnitude of the adjustment."
In a remarkable departure from its long history of low-profile foreign policy, especially since Deng Xiaoping took over China's leadership in the late 1970s, Beijing has recently committed up to 700 combat troops to South Sudan in the hopes of bringing peace to the world's newest nation—and, more importantly, preserving Chinas massive energy security interests abroad.
Souvid Datta was born in Mumbai and moved to London at the age of 10. Since then, he has been raised between the two metropolises, developing an interest in the fields of multimedia journalism and social justice. Since winning his first dSLR in an iPhone travel photography competition in 2012, he has worked on photography projects on the Sonagachi slums in Kolkata, India; gangs in London; pollution in Xingtai and Ningbo, China; and drug addicts in Kabul, Afghanistan. His work has been published in The Guardian, TIME LightBox, and the BBC. Among many other awards, in 2015 he was the recipient of a Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography, and he won the College Photographer of the Year Portfolio Silver Prize in 2014 and the Alexia Foundation Student Grant in 2013. He graduated from University College London in Political Science and Conflict Studies in 2014. He believes photography is a powerful tool for self-expression, informing public debate, and documenting history.
Datta was one of the ChinaFile 2015 Abigail Cohen Fellows.
