A visiting Han civil servant asks a Uighur villager if he smokes or drinks liquor, and the two drink together. This image was posted on social media platform Meipian by the Han civil servant in a diary article about his homestay experience.
Anthropologist Darren Byler is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports, 2021) and an ethnographic monograph titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2022). His current research interests are focused on infrastructure development and global China in the context of Xinjiang and Malaysia.
The village children spotted the outsiders quickly. They heard their attempted greetings in the local language, saw the gleaming Chinese flags and round face of Mao Zedong pinned to their chests, and knew just how to respond. “I love China,” the children shouted urgently, “I love Xi Jinping.” Over the past year, reports have found their way out of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China of a campaign of religious and cultural repression of the region’s Muslims, and of their detention and confinement in a growing network of razor-wire-ringed camps that China’s government at times has dubbed “transformation through education centers” and at others “counter-extremism training centers” and, recently, amid international criticism, “vocational training centers.”
China’s growing engagement with African countries got a publicity boost on September 3 and 4 with the latest Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit. The triennial event brought leaders and officials from 53 African countries and the African Union (A.U.) to Beijing for meetings that culminated in a resolution to continue strengthening ties and a renewed pledge of billions of dollars in Chinese loans, grants, and investments. Over the past decade, China’s role in peace and security has also grown rapidly through arms sales, military cooperation, and peacekeeping deployments in Africa. Today, through FOCAC and support to the A.U., among other mechanisms, China is making a growing effort to take a systematic, pan-African approach to security on the continent.
U.S.-China trade is not merely a political question; it exists within a massive system that has been built over decades, the accretive results of countless choices by governments, businesses, consumers, and workers. It is at once a heaving, Brobdingnagian mass of steel and plastic, and a finely choreographed dance among itinerant factory workers, a lonely Filipino crew at sea, and countless other human beings who have found themselves in what most closely resembles an undeclared state, one hiding in plain sight. Its very scope suggests it will not easily yield to political whims.
Official Chinese narratives about the U.S.-China trade war have not included Chinese reflection or discussion of what role China’s own policies have played in creating trade tensions. Many of the concerns on structural issues, such as market access, intellectual property rights, forced technology transfer, and China’s industrial policies, are of common concern for the international community. Casting these concerns only in the U.S.-China bilateral context leads to narratives in China that accuse the U.S. of seeking to contain China’s rise. As China celebrates its 40th anniversary of reform and opening up, Chinese policymakers and academics are beginning to reflect on the need for further economic reforms. However, vested interests among various Chinese stakeholders make implementing these reforms increasingly complicated.
Mega-famous Chinese actress Fan Bingbing emerged from months of silence to admit on Weibo that she had evaded taxes and owed over U.S.$100 million worth of civil fines to Chinese authorities. In a remarkable apology, Fan wrote that, “without good national policies, without the love of the people, there is no Fan Bingbing.” Fan’s declaration follows revelations that she and other stars used “yin-yang” contracts, which involve submitting false incomes for movie deals to the tax bureau.
The second revision of the Chinese Communist Party’s internal discipline regulations in less than three years was introduced in August. The revised regulations are not dramatically different from the previous 2015 revisions. Not in the sense, at least, of adding explicit new restrictions on the conduct of Party members. The bulk of the new language has to do with broader ideological principles—and, more specifically, with the formulations around which Xi Jinping has sought to construct and consolidate his power in the realm of discourse. State media reported that the newly revised regulations strengthened restrictions concerning the online behavior of Party members through such platforms as WeChat. A notice published through the WeChat account of the Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper bore the eye-grabbing headline: “Attention Party members! Beginning October 1, WeChat messages cannot be sent like this, and serious violations will result in removal from the Party!”
A new analysis piece looks at how the Foreign NGO Law has been applied to foreign NGOs working to facilitate international adoption. Jasmine I-Shin Su takes a look at what has changed in the foreign adoption process since the implementation of the law.
As a result of applying the Foreign NGO Law on foreign adoption agencies, since July 2017 the Chinese government has prevented foreign adoption agencies from legally filing temporary activities in China, and has effectively shut down at least three major official programs that in the past have helped to facilitate international adoption.
