Playing to Win

By Zhang Xiaowu & Muyi Xiao on June 20, 2018

Zhang Xiaowu grew up and has lived his whole life in Rui’an, where he works as a full-time art teacher and a part-time documentary photographer. Located in China’s eastern coastal Zhejiang province, Rui’an used to be predominantly rural. In 1987, as the Reform and Opening policy was taking hold, China’s State Council redesignated the county a “county-level city.” In the years since, consecutive waves of rapid urbanization have swept through the area. Industrial and commercial projects gobbled up farmland. And Zhang, born in 1972, witnessed it all.

Zhang Xiaowu

on June 19, 2018

Zhang Xiaowu, born in 1972, is an art teacher and a freelance photographer based in Rui’an, a county-level city in China’s southeastern Zhejiang province. Zhang started making photos in 2007 and has won numerous awards. In 2015, Zhang was chosen as a grantee of the Seagate/Siyuefeng Young Photographers Project; in 2016, he was nominated for the Punctum Photography Award at the Lianzhou Photo Festival; in 2018 his work “Rural Recreation” won the Ruan Yizhong Documentary Photography Award. His works have been exhibited at Lianzhou Photo Festival and Lishui Photo Festival. In April 2018, Zhang had a solo show in Wenzhou city, Zhejiang.

‘Ruling Through Ritual’: An Interview with Guo Yuhua

By Ian Johnson on June 18, 2018

Guo Yuhua is one of China’s best-known sociologists and most incisive government critics. A professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, she has devoted her career to researching human suffering in Chinese society, especially that of peasants, the promised beneficiaries of Communist rule. Born in 1956, Guo grew up in one of the “big courtyards” of government housing compounds for the country’s ruling elite. Her parents were military officers who served in the central government. During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, senior leaders like her father were persecuted; he died in 1968 of liver cirrhosis after being denied medication.

One Year After They Almost Went to War, Can China and India Get Along?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Joel Wuthnow, Selina Ho & more on June 14, 2018

One year ago, the Chinese and Indian armies faced off at Doklam, a disputed Himalayan area on the border between China, India, and the tiny kingdom of Bhutan. While the two sides didn’t go to war over the border as they did in 1962, tensions were worryingly high until Beijing and New Delhi jointly agreed to remove their troops in late August. Where are Sino-Indian relations today? And what’s the likelihood another border stand-off will erupt in the near future?