Yao Ming’s Biggest Game: Hoops Reform in China

Basketball Team Owners Are Pushing the Government to Make Market-Oriented Changes

on May 9, 2016

Retired basketball superstar and Shanghai Sharks team owner Yao Ming is finding efforts to reform China’s professional sports environment a lot tougher than a slam dunk.

The former Houston Rockets center, who hung up his high tops in 2011, is trying to reshape the state-controlled China Basketball Association (CBA), which runs a 20-team league with a commercial value estimated at just 3 percent that of the NBA.

Eli MacKinnon

on May 9, 2016

Eli MacKinnon is a writer based in Shenzhen. Before moving to China, he worked as a science news reporter for Live Science. His interests are wide, but in recent years have been mostly subsumed by Chinese and China. MacKinnon follows Shenzhen’s young startup scene and the city’s mind-boggling development.

Xiaoxue Weng

on May 8, 2016

Xiaoxue Weng is a Researcher at Natural Resources Group. Her research focuses on natural resources governance, the informal economy, and the evolving role of Chinese and other emerging market players in Africa. As a part of her work, she engages closely with Chinese and African policymakers in the natural resource sector as well as Chinese, African, and international civil society organizations. She builds partnerships in China, Africa, and Europe for the International Institute for Environment and Development’s work on Chinese overseas investment in the global South.

William C. Kirby

on May 6, 2016

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is a University Distinguished Service Professor. Kirby serves as Chairman of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. At Harvard, he has also served as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Chairman of the History Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His current projects include case studies of trend-setting Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States. His most recent book is Can China Lead? (Harvard Business Review Press).

Christina Ho

on May 6, 2016

Christina Ho joined the Rutgers faculty in 2010 from the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Senior Fellow and Project Director of the China Health Law Initiative. She was previously Country Director and a senior policy advisor for the Clinton Foundation’s China program. During the Clinton Administration, she worked on the Domestic Policy Council at the White House and later led Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health legislative staff.

Ho received her A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard College, her M.P.P from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School where she was articles editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Her core teaching and scholarly interest is health law and policy.

How Should Global Stakeholders Respond to China’s New NGO Management Law?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Sebastian Heilmann , Thomas Kellogg & more on May 5, 2016

A new law gives broad powers to China’s police in regulating and surveilling the activities of foreign NGOs in China. The law would require foreign groups including foundations, charities, advocacy organizations, and academic exchange programs to register with the Public Security Bureau, as well as submit to a host of provisions regulating the groups’ finances, hiring practices, and activities. How should stakeholders around the world respond to the law?

Kyle Haddad-Fonda

on May 5, 2016

Kyle Haddad-Fonda studies the history of China’s ties to the Middle East. He holds a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His dissertation research examined relations between China and Egypt and between China and Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, highlighting the roles of Chinese Muslims and Arab leftists in mediating those relationships. He has previously held positions at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and the Center for Middle East Peace Studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Haddad-Fonda is currently Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Nicholas Sparks Foundation, a non-profit organization based in New Bern, North Carolina, that promotes access to global learning for students around the United States, with a focus on underserved rural communities.

Alibaba

By Duncan Clark on May 5, 2016

In just a decade and half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded and built Alibaba into one of the world’s largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and Presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China’s booming private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of middle class consumers.

Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material, including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own experience as an early adviser to Alibaba and two decades in China chronicling the Internet’s impact on the country to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba’s rise.

How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80 percent market share? As it forges ahead into finance and entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba’s ambitions? How does the Chinese government view its rise? Will Alibaba expand further overseas, including in the U.S.? Clark tells Alibaba’s tale in the context of China’s momentous economic and social changes, illuminating an unlikely corporate titan as never before. —HarperCollins

Book Review: 

James Ledbetter, The New York Times (April 15, 2016)
The Economist (April 9, 2016)
Eva Dou, Wall Street Journal (April 6, 2016)