China’s Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, are tightening controls on overseas spending by the country’s biggest companies and their highly visible billionaire CEOs.
Built in 1960, the nine-story Anhua Building was one of three apartment buildings in Beijing constructed explicitly to foster an experiment in communal living. The building has shared kitchens and a canteen, and common entertainment areas. The amenities were much better than average—including an elevator—at that time, but the rent was also higher. Many of the tenants were élites. However, with China’s rapid transition, the “Utopian model” was left behind and people gradually found the design of the building more troublesome than beneficial.
Chen Ronghui explores the surreal aspects of China’s theme parks. As one of this column’s editors has noted, he uses a large format camera to depict these public spaces as “the physical expression of a society’s desires.”
In June, across China, high school seniors are close to graduating. Lucky students will attend college in the fall, but first they must pass the annual gaokao, the notoriously difficult national college-entrance exam. This single exam determines which college they will go to and whether they will go at all. For many students from low-income families or from rural areas, the gaokao is the straightest route to a better future.
During the chaos of China’s Cultural Revolution, Chan Hak Chi and his wife Li Kit Hing swam for six hours from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. The date was July 16, 1973, the day the couple celebrates as their wedding anniversary. Chan, pictured above, continues to swim everyday in his adopted Hong Kong, some 44 years later.
In the early morning at the San He Talent Market in the factory-filled district of Long Hua on the outskirts of Shenzhen, a group of young drifters start to check the job boards looking for day-pay work that could be anything from passing out brochures on the street, serving as a paid audience member at a marketing event, or even renting out their national identity card for the day—or selling it on the black market. If they get paid, they bunk at cheap hostels. If they don’t, they spend the night at an Internet café. It’s hard to make long-term plans.
Andreas Fulda of the University of Nottingham has published a new article, “The Contested Role of Foreign and Domestic Foundations in the PRC: Policies, Positions, Paradigms, Power,” in the Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies. Fulda explores how both international and domestic foundations navigate their work in the Chinese context, raising questions about how the Foreign NGO Law might affect grant-making in the PRC.
This month, Chinese naval vessels departed the port of Zhanjiang for the East African country of Djibouti, the site of China’s first overseas military base, which is set to begin operations later this year. An editorial in the state-run Global Times trumpeted the deployment, confirming that China will base troops there, which is a stunning development—it’s the first time that a major Asian power outside of the U.S. (or Russia) has extended its military and logistics reach into the developing world.
Troubled Chinese real estate conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group has received another setback after shares of its U.S. cinema subsidiary, AMC Entertainment Holdings, plummeted 25 percent on Tuesday after it issued a profit warning for the second quarter.
On April 1, 2017—April Fool’s Day—the government made a surprise announcement that a satellite city bigger than New York would be built from scratch on the outskirts of Beijing. Official news site Xinhua described Xiong’an New District as the “plan of the millennium” and “a major national event.”
