Homes, businesses and even hospitals across northern China are running short of natural gas. Some schoolchildren are shivering. And in the chemical industry — well, the spandex supply is getting tight.
Shen Yun seems like a kitsch dance troupe. But Beijing sees it as the propaganda wing of the Falun Gong movement, and a threat to their rule – and hounds the dancers from city to city, trying to sabotage their shows.
The “Social Credit System” is designed to monitor and rate citizens and companies in China and to guide their behavior. “It is a wide-reaching project that touches on almost all aspects of everyday life,” the authors Mareike Ohlberg, Bertram Lang, and Shazeda Ahmed write in the new MERICS China Monitor. The authors analyze the current stage of the system’s implementation and they describe how it will likely function in practice. Their analysis is based on government publications, discussions in media and social networks, as well as pilot projects.
Aaron Halegua is a practicing lawyer, consultant, and research fellow at the New York University School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute and its Center for Labor and Employment Law. He is an expert on labor and employment law, access to justice and legal aid, dispute resolution, and business and human rights in the United States, China, and internationally. His current research interests include labor standards at Chinese companies’ overseas projects. He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.B. in International Relations from Brown University.
Halegua has consulted on labor issues in China, Myanmar, and Malaysia for Apple, the Ford Foundation, the International Labor Organization, the International Labor Rights Forum, the Asia Foundation, and the American Bar Association. He has written numerous book chapters, law review articles, and op-eds in publications such as the Hong Kong Law Journal, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, the Harvard Law & Policy Review, and the Washington Post. He is also the author of the report “Who Will Represent China’s Workers: Lawyers, Legal Aid, and the Enforcement of Labor Rights” (2016).
Halegua has been quoted on labor rights issues in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Bloomberg. He is also a participant in the Sino-American Dialogue on the Rule of Law and Human Rights organized by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and has been invited to speak to industry associations and at top universities and think tanks in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
As a practicing lawyer, Halegua has worked with both non-profit institutions and the world’s top law firms. In 2012, he won a federal court jury trial on behalf of six Chinese nail salon workers. His legal victories have been covered by The New York Times, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, and Chinese-language television and newspapers.
A threat by a senior Chinese diplomat to invade Taiwan the instant any U.S. warship visits the self-ruled island has sparked a war of words, with Taipei accusing Beijing of failing to understand what democracy means.
The protests in Feijia, a village in Beijing’s northeastern Chaoyang district, follow a controversial clean-up campaign that began after an apartment block fire killed 19 people last month, the South China Morning Post reports.
Chinese intelligence agencies are using social networks such as LinkedIn to establish contact with German politicians and officials, according to a study by Germany’s internal security service.
The new proposed curriculum for city schools is missing key parts of modern Chinese history, like Hong Kong’s 1967 pro-Communist riots against British rulers and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when Chinese troops killed hundreds of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing.
China Telecom Corp could become the Philippines’ third nationwide telecommunications operator, officials of the Southeast Asian country said on Sunday, as the government sought to stir up competition to boost notoriously poor fixed-line broadband and mobile network operations.
