From My Anguished Heart—A Letter to My Daughter

An Excerpt from ‘Ten Letters from a Plague Year,’ by Xu Zhangrun, Translated and Annotated by Geremie R. Barmé

By Xu Zhangrun & Geremie R. Barmé on July 21, 2022

In early July 2020, Xu Zhangrun was detained for supposedly having “solicited prostitutes” during a trip with friends to Sichuan in late 2019. He was being persecuted for his unsparing critiques of Xi Jinping, starting in July 2018. The following letter is addressed to the writer’s daughter, who, having just completed her doctoral studies in Australia, was about to return to Beijing.

Laura T. Murphy

on July 13, 2022

Laura T. Murphy is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of numerous books and academic articles on the subject of forced labor and human trafficking globally. Her current work focuses on forced labor in the Uyghur Region of China, including in the solar, apparel, and building materials industries. She has consulted for the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Office of Victims of Crime, and the National Human Trafficking Training and Technical Assistance Center. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Freedom Fund, Arise Foundation, USAID, the U.S. Administration of Children and Families, the National Humanities Center, and the British Academy. Her most recent book is Freedomville: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt.

Arrests and Charges Related to Hong Kong's National Security Law

on July 5, 2022

Since May 2021, Lydia Wong, Eric Yan-ho Lai, and Thomas Kellogg, from the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University, have tracked the implementation of Hong Kong’s National Security Law, tallying up arrests and prosecutions as well as assessing larger trends in the nature of such cases. In addition to hosting the two articles they have written about their findings (“New Data Show Hong Kong’s National Security Arrests Follow a Pattern” and “Arrest Data Show National Security Law Has Dealt a Hard Blow to Free Expression in Hong Kong”), ChinaFile is providing regularly-updated data about these cases on a stand-alone page: “Tracking the Impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law.” Check back here frequently for information about new arrests or updates to cases working their way through the legal system.

2021 (Most Recent) Official PRC Place Name Data Available for Download

on July 5, 2022

For the last few years, ChinaFile has collected and hosted the list of official names of all the places (political units) in China. This information is openly available on the Chinese government’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) website, but not in an easily downloadable or searchable format. We have compiled these lists in CSV format in the hopes they may be of use to other researchers.

Participation in Xinjiang Surveillance Program Can Lead to Smoother Career Enhancement

By Jessica Batke on July 5, 2022

Since 2014, authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have, as Human Rights Watch phrases it, sent “cadres from government agencies, state-owned enterprises, and public institutions to regularly visit and surveil people.” The program, known as “Visit the People, Benefit the People, Bring Together the Hearts of the People,” is one way the government keeps tabs on Uyghurs and other ethnic minority residents of the region.

A Note on Notes From ChinaFile

on July 5, 2022

As ChinaFile approaches its 10th birthday, we find ourselves occasionally having something on the short side to say. Notes from ChinaFile will provide a dwelling place on our site for recommendations of books or articles, shrewd thoughts we overhear or that you send us, treasures from our archives, short chats with contributors, documents in search of a story, questions, partially formed ideas, clever uses for a scallion, and likely much else that hasn’t yet occurred to us. We’ll keep you posted.

Visually Understanding the Data on Foreign NGO Representative Offices and Temporary Activities

By Jessica Batke on July 5, 2022

The China NGO Project has created the following visualizations based on data available on the Ministry of Public Security website, as well as on our own research. To analyze foreign NGO representative offices, we looked at organizations’ countries/regions of origin, province and date of registration, fields of work, and number of representative offices per organization.