The Yi, one of China’s poorest ethnic minorities, originate from the barren mountains of Liangshan, Sichuan province. The average income in Liangshan is 27 percent of the national average, and 30 percent of the population is illiterate. The Yi’s Tibeto-Burman language further separates them from other regions of China, where Mandarin dominates.
Since the 1960s, parents have used “matchmakers” to sell thousands of unwanted infant girls from Changle, Fujian to Putian, a wealthier part of the province 60 miles away. Some parents raised these girls as their own children, but others treated them like maids, or “tongyangxi,” pre-adolescent daughters raised for the purpose of marrying their “brothers.” A centuries-old tradition rooted in misogyny, tongyangxi gained in popularity during the one-child policy, in effect from the late 1970s to 2016.
The German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) registered its third office in China on November 9, according to Ministry of Public Security information, even though Chinese authorities forced a student studying under one of DAAD’s China programs to leave the country in August. As The China NGO Project has previously written, German citizen David Missal was studying at Tsinghua University through a DAAD scholarship program when Chinese Entry-Exit Administration officials told him his visa would not be renewed. Though never given a direct reason for the visa denial, it is likely because Missal was reporting on detained human rights lawyers.
Christopher Magoon is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and a 2018 American Mandarin Society Next-Generation Scholar. He was a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar in China studying Public Health. Prior to entering medical school, he lived in Yunnan Province as a Henry Luce Scholar. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Foreign Policy, and other publications.
In late October, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the “Reform and Opening Up” policy, China’s Chairman Xi Jinping visited the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, the first major laboratory for the Party’s post-Mao economic reforms. Like his predecessors, Xi often praises the policy, which the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping launched in 1978. Xi visited Shenzhen, he said, “so that we can declare to the world: China’s reform and opening will never stop.”
Last year I got a call from Abbess Yin, an old friend who runs a Daoist nunnery near Nanjing. I’ve always known her as supernaturally placid and oblique, but this time she was nervous and direct: a group of Germans were coming to spend a week learning about Daoist life; could I travel down from Beijing to help? To translate, I asked? No, she said impatiently, to mediate—to avoid a disaster. These foreigners, she explained, had spent years learning qigong (a neologism that refers to Chinese forms of meditation and exercise practices broadly similar to tai chi).
Berthold Kuhn of Freie Universitat Berlin has published a new paper looking at “Changing Spaces for Civil Society Organisations in China.” This framework explicitly pushes back against the notion that civil society space is uniformly shrinking, instead positing that the space available is highly dependent on the individual organization and the type of work it seeks to do.
Today, the Ministry of Public Security WeChat Account posted information and graphics about the number of representative offices registered and the number of temporary activities filed between January 2017 and the end of September 2018. A partial English translation of this post is available from China Development Brief. The China NGO Project’s own representation of this information, updated monthly, is available here.
