Mike Chinoy

on May 23, 2023

Mike Chinoy is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute. He spent 24 years as a foreign correspondent for CNN, serving as the network’s first Beijing Bureau Chief and Senior Asia Correspondent. He won Emmy, Dupont, and Peabody Awards for his coverage of Tiananmen Square. He is the author of five books: China Live: People Power and the Television Revolution, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, The Last POW, Are You With Me: Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement, and the just-released Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.

‘They Are Men Who Acted out of Conscience’

A ChinaFile Translation

on May 22, 2023

Last month, a Chinese court sentenced the civil rights activists and lawyers Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi to fourteen and twelve years in prison for “subverting state power,” a charge arising from an informal gathering of fellow activists the two had put together in 2019 in the southern coastal city of Xiamen. The following conversation, excerpted and translated, comes from an episode of the podcast Bu Mingbai. In it, host and New York Times reporter Li Yuan interviews Ding’s wife, Luo Shengchun, and Xu’s close friend, law school classmate and fellow activist Teng Biao, about who these two men are, how they came to their activism, and why they persisted despite previous imprisonments and amid mounting signs of personal danger.

Bu Mingbai Podcast

on May 22, 2023

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Bu Mingbai Podcast (不明白) was co-founded by The New York Times columnist Li Yuan and Chinese journalists working for Western media organizations in May 2022. The literal translation of the Chinese name is “I Don’t Understand.” The podcast aims to provide uncensored interviews with experts and ordinary Chinese about current affairs in China. It was blocked in China from the second episode on and the name of the podcast became a sensitive word on the Chinese Internet. People in 199 countries have listened to the podcast.

Can Chinese Payment Apps Gain Traction Globally?

An Excerpt from ‘The Cashless Revolution’

By Martin Chorzempa on May 19, 2023

Chinese-owned social media app TikTok is a global phenomenon. Yet, for every TikTok, there is a WeChat, an app that is ubiquitous in China but that has failed to catch fire abroad. WeChat is just one of many Chinese apps incorporating financial technology (fintech), helping remake how more than one billion people think about banking and spending money.

Official PRC Place Names

on May 15, 2023

These datasets list the 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 compiled these lists in CSV format and we’ve published them here in the hopes they may be of use to other researchers.

‘Beijing’s Global Media Offensive’

A Q&A with Joshua Kurlantzick

By Abby Seiff & Joshua Kurlantzick on May 15, 2023

Over the past several years, there has been an active debate about Chinese influence overseas. Amidst allegations that Beijing has influenced foreign elections and politicians, state newswire Xinhua has expanded into one of the largest news agencies worldwide, and state-linked media companies have taken over Chinese-language media sources internationally. Joshua Kurlantzick discusses this landscape in his newest book, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World. Kurlantzick spoke with ChinaFile Editorial Fellow Abby Seiff about his book. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Investing in Tourism in Xinjiang, Beijing Seeks New Ways to Control the Region’s Culture

By Eva Xiao on May 12, 2023

In a county where authorities ran multiple internment camps in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, the local government has commissioned a new set of buildings for a very different demographic: tourists. These sites and services, which were commissioned, opened, or expanded during the pandemic, are all part of the Xinjiang government’s efforts to promote tourism across Xinjiang. Last year, the government completed a stretch of more than 2,700 kilometers of railroad tracks encircling the Taklamakan desert, a circuit aimed at improving the local economy, including by offering special rail services that target tourists.