Foreign NGO Law Causes Drop in U.S. Adoptions, According to State Department

According to the State Department’s Special Advisor for Children’s Issues, the Foreign NGO Law has significantly decreased the number of children U.S. citizens have been able to adopt from China. In a March 14 briefing addressing the Department’s Annual Report on Intercountry Adoption, Special Advisor Suzanne Lawrence stated that overall international adoption numbers are down in large part due to the decline in adoptions from China. Though Lawrence noted that this decline is partly due to improved economic circumstances in China, as well as changing demographics in terms of the children being put up for international adoption, she also explained that the Foreign NGO Law has clearly affected adoption service providers who had previously been working in China.

Lawrence C. Reardon

Lawrence C. Reardon is a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center and an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire, where he co-founded and is the current coordinator of the Asian studies minor. He received his B.A. at The Johns Hopkins University, and M.I.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University (1991). He wrote The Reluctant Dragon: The Impact of Crisis Cycles on Chinese Foreign Economic Policy (University of Washington Press/University of Hong Kong Press, 2001/2014), and has written on China’s foreign policy for China Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary China, China Business Review, and The Journal of Shenzhen University. He translated two volumes of key Chinese policy documents concerning China’s coastal development strategy (Chinese Law and Government, 1994). His current manuscript on Chinese foreign economic policy during the 1980s is currently under review. He also conducts research on religion, with a special emphasis on the Chinese religion, the Catholic Church, and Sino-Vatican relations. He co-edited and contributed to The Catholic Church and the Nation-State (Georgetown University Press, 2006), contributed single-authored chapters to When Theology and Politics Meet: Pope Francis as a Global Actor (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), Religious Transformation in Modern Asia: A Transnational Movement (Brill, 2015), and Democratic Development and Political Terrorism (Northeast University Press, 2005). Reardon published a single-authored article on Chinese religion for The Journal of Chinese Affairs (2011). He has contributed several pieces to be published by the Oxford Encyclopedia on Politics and Religion and is currently completing a chapter on the Catholic Church for the Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism.

Kenneth Hammond

Kenneth Hammond is a Professor at New Mexico State University. He has taught there since receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in History and East Asian Languages in 1994. Hammond specializes in the history of China in the Early Modern period, especially the 16th century. He has published numerous articles on Chinese intellectual and political history, and his book Pepper Mountain: The Life, Death and Posthumous Career of Yang Jisheng, 1516-1555 came out in 2007. In 1999, Hammond was a Research Fellow at the Institute of History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and in 2002-2003 he was a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. From 2007 to 2015, he was Co-Director of the Confucius Institute at New Mexico State. Since 2017, he has been affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Hammond has been a lecturer for the National Geographic Society and for the Smithsonian Institution in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Hammond’s principal current research project is Cities, Markets, Maps, a study of urban transformation in early modern China and its visual representation in maps and other images.

Is This the Last Dalai Lama?

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet. His departure exposed the rift between the Tibetan faithful and the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), one which has not closed in the six decades since—and which threatens to become even deeper once the current Dalai Lama, 83-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, passes on.

‘I Can’t Sleep: Homage to a Uyghur Homeland’

A Q&A with Photographer Lisa Ross

In the 2000s, New York-based artist Lisa Ross traveled to the city of Turpan in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and photographed local people on the beds that they keep in their fields. The portraits in that series are currently on exhibit at the Miyako Yoshinaga gallery in New York through March 16, 2019. ChinaFile’s Visuals Editor, Muyi Xiao, interviewed Ross about the work and its connection to the campaign of repression and incarceration of Uighurs taking place in Xinjiang today.

Mukaddas Mijit

Mukaddas Mijit performs at the exhibition of ‘I Can’t Sleep: Homage to a Uyghur Homeland’ at the Miyako Yoshinaga gallery in New York, January 2019.