Malin Oud

on May 15, 2015

Malin Oud is an international development and human rights professional with 15 years’ experience of policy dialogue and development cooperation in North East Asia, including as head of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute’s China Office from 2001 to 2009, as Consultant to the United Nations Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, and as Program Manager at Sida, the Swedish development agency. She studied Chinese language, Chinese law, and international human rights law in Lund, Kunming, and London, and has an M.A. in International Development from Melbourne University. Since 2011, she has been the Managing Director of Tracktwo, a consultancy specialized in sustainability and responsible business, based in Stockholm. She is also a Senior Advisor at the Institute for Human Rights and Business.

Nick Young

on May 15, 2015

Nick Young created China Development Brief in 1996 and ran it, on the most threadbare of shoestrings, until expelled by the Government of China in 2007. Originally an English language print publication, the brief evolved into separate ‘sister’ magazines and websites in English and Chinese. Since leaving China, Young has been mainly in East Africa, where he created and passed on to local journalists Oil in Uganda. He does consulting work in fields ranging from natural resource governance to communication to disability, blogs occasionally on nickyoungwrites.com and grows apples between times at his family home in Cantabria.

Back in the 20th century, he worked as a residential social worker in a U.K. probation hostel, as a translator and writer in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, as Special Adviser to the Rt. Hon. Ann Taylor, MP, (Shadow Environment Secretary) and subsequently as Malaŵi correspondent for The Financial Times, The Economist, The Economist Intelligence Unit and Africa Confidential.

Young was born in Zambia and raised in the U.K., where he studied Philosophy at the University of Stirling and Kings College, London.

Dying to Breathe—A Short Film Shows China’s True Cost of Gold

By Sim Chi Yin on May 15, 2015

This is the unseen cost of gold mining in China—the world’s top gold producer. In China, silicosis is considered a form of pneumoconiosis, which affects an estimated six million workers who toil in gold, coal, or silver mines or in stone-cutting factories. It’s the country’s most prevalent occupational disease.

Health
Public Health, Mining

Mao’s China: The Language Game

By Perry Link on May 15, 2015

It can be embarrassing for a China scholar like me to read Eileen Chang’s pellucid prose, written more than sixty years ago, on the early years of the People’s Republic of China. How many cudgels to the head did I need before arriving at comparable clarity? My disillusioning first trip to China in 1973? My reading of the devastating journalism of Liu Binyan in 1980? Observation of bald lies in action at the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and in the imprisonment of a Nobel Peace laureate in more recent times? Did I need all of this to catch up to where Chang was in 1954 in her understanding of how things worked in Communist China, beneath the blankets of jargon? In graduate school I did not take Chang’s Naked Earth (published in Chinese in 1954 and translated by Chang into English in 1956) and its sister novel, The Rice-Sprout Song (also published in 1954 and translated by Chang into English in 1955), very seriously. People said the works had an anti-Communist bias. How silly.

Zhou Dan

on May 14, 2015

Zhou Dan is a practicing lawyer based in Shanghai. As one of few people to have come out as gay to Chinese local, national, and international media, he is a pioneering advocate for full and equal recognition of rights related to sexual orientation and gender identity in China. Over the past decade, he has been working towards these goals through consulting services, public education, public policy, and legal advocacy, as well as training sessions and conferences.

In addition, in 2009 he published Pleasure and Discipline: Jurisprudential Imagination of Same-Sex Desire in Chinese Modernity, a ground-breaking monograph on the dynamics of same-sex desire, law, and modernity in China. He speaks on LGBT rights issues at workshops, seminars, and symposia in China, the United States, Germany, and other countries.