In this edition of Depth of Field: aspiring ballerinas, what’s beneath the gilt in a rich Zhejiang town, worn out doctors, disappearing schools, melting snow, data farms, and the powerful appeal of dancing outdoors.
Paul S. Triolo leads the Eurasia Group’s newest practice, focusing on global technology policy issues, cybersecurity, Internet governance, ICT regulatory issues, and emerging areas such as automation, AI/Big Data, ambient intelligence, and fintech/blockchain. He is building a cross-issue and cross-regional team that helps clients understand and assess the risk generated by the complex intersection of politics, technology innovation, security threats, and the changing global regulatory environment.
Prior to joining Eurasia Group, Triolo served in senior positions within the U.S. government for more than 25 years, focusing primarily on China’s rise as a science and technology and cyber power. He provided analytic support to the president and senior policymakers, and was the lead drafter for a number of widely acclaimed national estimates on China science and technology innovation and industrial policies, as well as cyberspace issues. Triolo’s technical background, including a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Penn State University and work experience in Silicon Valley, along with his extensive work on Internet governance and policy issues in government, have prepared him to tackle the substantial challenges companies will face in cyberspace. Triolo is a China Digital Economy Fellow (non-resident) at New America. He is also an avid early adopter of all sorts of green and information technologies and platforms, and has been the family chief technology officer for some time.
The thought of hearing back from Simon Leys filled me with dread. It was late 1976 and I was an exchange student at a university in Shenyang, in northeast China. I’d only recently learned that Pierre Ryckmans, the man who had taught me Chinese, was none other than Simon Leys, a writer both celebrated and reviled in the French-speaking world.
Nonprofit Policy Forum, an international journal focused on public policy as it relates to the work of non-profit organizations, recently released a Special Issue on Nonprofit Policymaking in China. The issue delves into the policy styles, goals, and drivers of non-profit policy-making in China as a means to explain China’s recent non-profit policy-making momentum, power reconfiguration, and organizational developments.
At first, Beijing’s Qimei Mansion looks no different from China’s countless other residential towers. But every weekend, five to six thousand students come here to spend their time off from schoo learning. In this six story building, more than 30 education companies offer classes ranging from English to piano, crafting and dancing.
Yang Zhazha has photographed more than 200 square dances in Beijing. This form of recreation is practiced mostly by retirees and has become popular across China in recent years. The dances—which are unrelated to American square dances— take their name not from the arrangement of dancers but because they take place in public squares, people gather at sunset and the often loud music plays well into the night.
Today, more than 300 million people in mainland China are considered to be middle class, and the number is fast growing. Photographer Zhao Caixia made portraits of dozens of people in their homes in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, the richest province in China after the municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai. In the picture above, Wei Sanshu sits in an egg chair in his home, which he decorated in a mixture of European styles.
The Shanghai’s Mansion nightclub is a popular party scene during the weekend and a hostel where tenants can stay for free year round. The Mansion’s founder, 54-year-old Rainbow Gao, who also founded Beijing’s first live-music bar and China’s first international modeling agency, says she wants to give people “an idea that money is not important.” Residents must sign a tenancy agreement, which requires them to commit to a minimum stay of three months stay, maintenance and upkeep, compliance with house rules, and a deposit of $160.
The once impoverished province of Guizhou recently became wealthy in data farms and vocational schools. China’s “big three” telecom companies, as well as Apple and Foxconn, lured by cheap labor and abundant hydropower all have data centers. Workers, some of them students, identify objects in still images taken from street camera footage, providing the tech companies troves of test data for their artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.
On May 12, China commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Sichuan Earthquake, one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history, which claimed more than 80,000 lives. This story by photographer Sun Junbin stood out from the numerous photo essays commemorating the earthquake and its victims. Sun not only took pictures himself, but also collected old photographs and artifacts, which he stitched together to construct a moving story about the victims, the survivors, what the places the earthquake destroyed look like today.
