David Cowhig

on November 30, 2022

David Cowhig writes 高大伟 David Cowhig’s Translation Blog in northern Virginia. He worked at the U.S. State Department for 25 years, including 10 years in Beijing and Chengdu and four years working on China in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He is the translator (together with his wife, Jessie Cowhig) of Liao Yiwu's book Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre (Atria/One Signal, 2019). Prior to joining the State Department, he was a freelance translator of Japanese, an English teacher in Taiwan, and a summer farm worker in South Trondelag and Hordaland, Norway.

China in Protest

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Guobin Yang, Taisu Zhang & more on November 29, 2022

Over the weekend, large demonstrations broke out in cities across China. The protests followed news, spread rapidly across Chinese and international social media, that a fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumchi on Friday had turned deadly, claiming at least 10 lives, possibly as a result of the region’s COVID lockdowns. Throngs of residents took to the streets in anger, where the singing of “The Internationale” and China’s national anthem mingled with calls to end the zero-COVID policy. In Shanghai, where protesters gathered Saturday on the city’s Urumchi Road, chants expressed both support for the fire’s victims as well as calls for the lifting of zero-COVID restrictions, and even demands—extraordinary in a country that does not tolerate political dissent—that China’s Communist Party and its newly reappointed leader, Xi Jinping, “step down.” On Sunday, demonstrators appeared at multiple locations across Beijing, including Peking and Tsinghua universities, where some called for “universal rights” and “freedom of expression” while others held aloft blank sheets of paper, symbols of the many things they were forbidden to say.

Ja Ian Chong

on November 29, 2022

Chong Ja Ian is a Nonresident Scholar at Carnegie China, where he examines U.S.-China dynamics in Southeast Asia and the broader Asia-Pacific. Chong is also an Associate Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2008 and previously taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research covers the intersection of international and domestic politics, with a focus on the externalities of major power competition, nationalism, regional order, security, contentious politics, and state formation. He also works on U.S.-China relations, security and order in Northeast and Southeast Asia, cross-strait relations, and Taiwan’s politics.

U.S.-China Dynamics in Southeast Asia

A China in the World Podcast

By Paul Haenle & Evan A. Laksmana on November 23, 2022

Paul Haenle speaks with Evan Laksmana about U.S.-China dynamics in Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian views of U.S. foreign policy in the region. Haenle and Laksmana touch on the role of ASEAN, the Quad, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, as well as China and the United States’ competing visions of regional order.

The Appliances Are Listening

An Excerpt from ‘Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty’

By Aynne Kokas on November 22, 2022

Americans’ addiction to low-cost consumer products, particularly connected (or “smart”) devices, has led to a world where data security takes a back seat to affordability. Consumer products have razor-thin profit margins, making everything from smart watches to baby monitors a potential source of data exploitation. Since firms with significant operations in China face intensive pressure to share consumer data with China’s government, affordability directly works against the safety and security of consumer data. Such pressure enables what I term “data trafficking,” or the extraction of consumer data without explicit consent to achieve an international political advantage. But this is the last thing anyone wants to think about when they are hungry.

The Beginning of the End for Zero-COVID?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Taylor Loeb, Johanna M. Costigan & more on November 11, 2022

At the end of October, videos began circulating on social media of workers at an iPhone plant in the city of Zhengzhou fleeing factory grounds to escape a quarantine lockdown of some 200,000 employees. Whether the workers wanted to escape the lockdown itself or avoid COVID infection, the incident highlighted the ongoing challenges China faces in its management of the epidemic, and underlined the questions surrounding the longevity of China’s zero-COVID policy. Some experts expect China’s leaders will begin to experiment with a softening of restrictions in the coming months, and Chinese stocks briefly surged earlier this month amid rumors that rules would be loosened. But in recent days, Guangzhou has seen what officials have described as a “dire and complicated” outbreak, while rising COVID infection across the country has led to further lockdowns like the Zhengzhou plant’s. What are necessary preconditions for a softening of the policy? How will it end? And what are likely to be its consequences?

Barclay Bram

on November 11, 2022

Barclay Bram is a Junior Fellow on Chinese Society at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. He received his D.Phil. from Oxford University’s School of Global and Area Studies. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in China in 2018-2019 on mental health and psychological counselling. Bram is also an audio producer at The Economist, and was a member of the team that made The Prince. He has also written widely as an essayist and journalist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, The Financial Times, The London Review of Books, Wired, and Granta.

Evan A. Laksmana

on November 9, 2022

Evan A. Laksmana is a Nonresident Scholar at Carnegie China, where he examines U.S.-China dynamics in Southeast Asia and the broader Asia-Pacific. Laksmana is a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on military change, civil-military relations, and Southeast Asian defense and foreign policies. He is also currently a nonresident scholar with the Lowy Institute for International Policy.

Laksmana was previously a senior researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Indonesia and the Wang Gungwu Visiting Fellow with the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He has held visiting and research positions with the National Bureau of Asian Research, the Sydney University Southeast Asia Centre, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU. He has consulted for the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the UNODC Global Maritime Crime Programme, Transparency International, and other international institutions and government agencies.

His peer-reviewed research has appeared in The Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Security, Asia Policy, Asian Politics & Policy, Defense & Security Analysis, Defence Studies, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, and other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and others, and has contributed to the RAND Corporation, Brookings Institution, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Royal United Services Institute, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, and others.

He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs as a Fulbright Presidential Scholar. He received additional training in social science methodology and defense policy analysis from Columbia University (SWAMOS), U.S. Department of Defense (APCSS), the University of Michigan (ICPSR), and Syracuse University (IQMR). He was part of the International Institute for Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue Young Southeast Asian Leaders and a fellow of the International Security Forum–Asia.

ChinaFile Presents: Nury Turkel, No Escape

By Nury Turkel & Jessica Batke on November 7, 2022

In his recent book, No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs, attorney and activist Nury Turkel tells his personal story—his birth in a re-education camp in China, his journey to the United States, and his career working to end the ongoing human rights crisis in his native Xinjiang. On November 1, Turkel spoke with ChinaFile Senior Editor Jessica Batke.