Lake Dian in Kunming, the capital of southwest China’s Yunnan province, suffered greatly when, in the 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong called on the Chinese people to “conquer nature” and reclaim land by filling lakes with soil.
On Tuesday in an article headlined, “Declaring War on China’s Currency? Ha ha,” the People’s Daily attacked billionaire investor George Soros for suggesting he might short the renminbi. The Chinese currency has dropped 5.7 percent since August when the central bank allowed it to depreciate. Last week, without mentioning the renminbi, Soros said he was betting against Asian currencies, telling Bloomberg Television that, in China, “A hard landing is practically unavoidable.” Is Soros right?
This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are joined by Deborah Seligsohn, former science counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and currently a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, where she studies environmental governance in China. With more than 20 years of experience working with China, Deborah is one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the question of China’s policy response to questions of air pollution and climate change, which is why we are delighted to have her on the show.
The 45-year-old caregiver was calm on the witness stand, but her words were jarring. He Tiandai admitted during her murder trial that she killed a 70-year-old woman she cared for by poisoning her soup with sleeping pills and pesticide, injecting her body with the same soup, and then strangling her for good measure. On top of this, a prosecutor said that He Tiandai told police she tried to kill nine other elderly patients between June 2013 and December 2014—and succeeded seven times.
By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.
Chinese special operations forces are training in the western deserts of Xinjiang in complex search and rescue missions, in environments that closely resemble North Africa or certain parts of the Middle East.
Hundreds of thousands of people are turning to social media in an attempt to find their missing children.
