ChinaFile Presents: ‘Nikah,’ a Film Screening and Discussion

The film ‘Nikah,’ set in China’s Uyghur region in 2017, spans the months between two weddings. It follows Dilber, a young woman approaching a crossroads amid the Chinese government’s surveilling and detaining of members of her community. As even her most personal decisions become suddenly political, Dilber must struggle with the tension between tradition and modernity, as her world closes in around her. Co-directors Mukaddas Mijit and Bastien Ehouzan were in conversation with ChinaFile Senior Editor for Investigations Jessica Batke about the film.

Bastien Ehouzan

Bastien Ehouzan is co-founder of KIDAM, a film production company based in Bordeaux and Paris, founded in 2010. He has partnered with the production company L’Endroit since 2018. Nikah is his first medium-length film.

Mukaddas Mijit

Mukaddas Mijit is an ethnomusicologist, filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer, born in Ürümchi in the Uyghur region. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, working on Uyghur artistic reaction in the diaspora after the human rights crisis in the Uyghur region. Nikah is her first medium-length film.

Howard Zhang

Howard Zhang is a former head of BBC’s China Service, a seasoned journalist, broadcaster, and media commentator specializing in Chinese contemporary history, domestic politics, and geopolitics. Born in Mao-era China, Zhang grew up in the early reform years of Deng, and left China in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. He lived and studied in Canada in the 1990s, and moved to London in 2000 and worked for the BBC World Service for nearly 24 years. Zhang was head of BBC News Chinese from 2016 to 2023.

Kenneth J. DeWoskin

Kenneth J. DeWoskin is a former partner for China Strategy and Business Development in PwC China, founder of Deloitte’s China Research and Insight Centre as a Senior Advisor and Eminence Fellow. A former professor of International Business and Chairman and Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, DeWoskin has been involved with China for over 50 years and has lived and worked extensively in both China and in Japan.

Dexter Tiff Roberts

Dexter Tiff Roberts is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub and the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, which is part of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He also serves as the founder and publisher of Trade War, a weekly newsletter on Chinese business and politics, with over four thousand subscribers from government, finance, and academia. He is an award-winning writer and speaker on the Chinese economy and U.S.-China relations. His analysis, writing, and commentary have been featured in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NPR, the BBC, and CNN. He teaches Chinese politics at the University of Montana and is principal and founder of Cold Mountain LLC.

Roberts served for more than two decades as China Bureau Chief and Asia News Editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, based in Beijing, where he covered China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, the impact of the Global Financial Crisis, and the rise of authoritarian leader Xi Jinping. He has reported from all of China’s provinces and regions including Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as from Mongolia, Cambodia, and North Korea. Previously, he was Director of China Affairs at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center.

Roberts has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University and a Master of International Affairs focusing on China from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. He studied at National Taiwan Normal University’s Mandarin Training Center in Taipei and speaks fluent Chinese. Roberts’ first book, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2020), was chosen as one of The Economist’s “best books of the year” for 2020, and was a best seller in Chinese, published by Taiwan’s Gusa Publishing.

How Much Will New Stimulus Improve China’s Economic Outlook?

A ChinaFile Conversation

After months of downbeat economic news and little action from the Chinese government, Beijing has announced a slew of stimulus measures. Are the stimulus measures enough to make a difference and are they going to work as long as secular trends like demographics and global uncertainty don’t change? What signal should we look for to understand if the stimulus measures will work? How will China’s economy perform in the next year?