Photographer Xue Jun documents the life of 11-year-old Shasha in rural Hunan, China. When she was seven months old, her mother died from a brain tumor, and last year her father died from complications from the AIDS virus. Shasha was left to live with her grandparents. When word spread that Shasha is also HIV positive, her school threw her out, isolating her from her friends and others.
Official records reveal that China’s cancer patients have been getting younger over the past two decades. Noting the trend, Caixin staff photographers Wan Jia and Lai Yiting met and interviewed several young adults with cancer.
In rural Sichuan province, near Xiaoliangshan, 2,500 members of the Yi minority group live in an abandoned labor camp where they are able to earn a meager living growing tea. Many of the children there were born in violation of China’s now defunct One-Child Policy, which means that many don’t have a hukou (household registration ID) and so cannot attend school. Even for those who do have IDs, the nearest school is about a two-hour trek through the mountains.
In the 1980s, many Chinese suffering from leprosy were relocated to the remote village of Maowangdong in the mountains of Yunnan province. The area still carries a stigma, decades later, although many villagers survived and have had healthy offspring. Feng Haiyong documents one NGO’s effort to help villagers break away from isolation and poverty through beekeeping.
For longer than anyone can remember, the Yangtze River would swell past its banks with each flood season. That is, until China followed Mao’s advice and built the great Three Gorges Dam which calmed the flood waters and solved many of China’s water problems. At least that was how it was supposed to work. This year, China’s Minister of Water Resources warned that citizens should expect the worst in El Niño flooding. But despite forecasts of torrential rains, riverside residents are confident major floods will be averted.
Early this year, Hu Mingliang and Sun Wenlin filed a lawsuit against their local municipal Civil Affairs bureau in Changsha for refusing them a marriage license because they were gay. Though not the first couple to file such a lawsuit, theirs was the first in China to be accepted by a district court. Last month, the court ruled against the couple. Earlier this month, when Hu and Sun held a symbolic wedding ceremony, photographer Huang Qiqing was there.
As of 2014, more than 88,000 Chinese children had been adopted by American families. Eighty-eight percent of them were girls. Wu Jiaxiang photographed several American families as they embarked on the process of adopting Chinese children, a process that can cost more than U.S.$15,000 and take as long as two years.
This month’s Depth of Field column brings the stories of Chinese adoption; the marriage ceremony of Hu Mingliang and Sun Wenlin, a gay couple who filed the first civil rights marriage lawsuit to be accepted by a Chinese court (they lost); beekeepers in Yunnan; the lonely life of an 11-year-old with AIDS; and archival photos from China in the 1970s.
Depth of Field highlights the new and newsworthy photojournalism published in Chinese media by Chinese photographers.
China and Russia are solidifying their bilateral relationship as the former looks westward and the latter turns to its east borders. In this podcast with Paul Haenle, Dmitri Trenin discusses the conditions that are leading to stronger China-Russian ties, including China’s growing influence in Eurasia and Russia’s shifting foreign policy orientation.
Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, has been with the center since its inception. He also chairs the research council and the Foreign and Security Policy Program.
He retired from the Russian Army in 1993. From 1993-1997, Trenin held a post as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. In 1993, he was a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome.
He served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993, including experience working as a liaison officer in the external relations branch of the Group of Soviet Forces (stationed in Potsdam) and as a staff member of the delegation to the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms talks in Geneva from 1985 to 1991. He also taught at the War Studies Department of the Military Institute from 1986 to 1993.
