Postcard
01.18.16
A People’s Friendship
It takes a brave man to jump off a moving train for the sake of a sale, but the clothes hawkers had the easy courage of men who did this on the regular. I watched as they leapt off the front carriage as the train chugged into a station with no stop...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.11.15A Wordless Elegy for China’s War Dead
New York Times
Mr. Wang explained why he wanted to write a requiem about a war that ended 70 years ago.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.07.15Xi'an City Wall: How China Turned A Military Site Into A Unique Park
CNN
Xi'an, China's 637-year-old city wall is a relatively new kid on the block.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.03.15You Can't Understand China Unless You Know How the Communist Party Thinks
Huffington Post
The CPC came into being in 1921, almost a century ago.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.24.15Tibet, Taiwan and China – A Complex Nexus
Diplomat
Recent developments in cross-strait relations raise interesting questions for Tibet’s leadership in exile.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.24.15Ever Wonder How China Got Back Into International Diplomacy After the Cultural Revolution?
Diplomat
China’s successful entry into the international scene after the Cultural Revolution bears lessons for other pariah states.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.23.15Would India Dare Risk Antagonizing China?
Council on Foreign Relations
I found a striking consensus about the relative stability between the two giant Asian neighbors.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.23.15Hong Kong May Be A Little Insecure, But It's No 'Slave'
South China Morning Post
I don't much care to weigh in on the subject of Hong Kong remaining a place where non-Asians are able to prosper.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.20.15China Is Trying to Warn Taiwan Voters
Bloomberg
The possibility of conflict between China and Taiwan is dangerous to the world’s security.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.20.15Why 2,500-Year-Old Tale Gives Ma Hope for Chinese Democracy
Bloomberg
Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou said history gives him hope for political change on the Communist-ruled mainland.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.18.15McDonald's China Heritage Outlet Criticised
BBC
The opening of a McDonald's outlet in the home of former Taiwanese leader Chiang Ching-kuo in Hangzhou, China has sparked a controversy.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.18.15India-China Talks Fail To Make Progress on Border Dispute
Defense News
"This is the highest level defense delegation to visit India in the recent years. The visit signifies the enhanced defense exchanges between India and China."
ChinaFile Recommends
11.16.15China Tired of the Boiler Suit
Guardian
“Why can people who glory in color and fun and variety wear a uniform of boiler suits that brings drabness and dreariness to every gathering?”
ChinaFile Recommends
11.12.15Q. and A.: Ezra F. Vogel on China’s Shifting Relations With Japan and Taiwan
New York Times
Mr. Vogel is working on a book that will explore moments in history when China and Japan were in closest contact.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.12.15Nancy Pelosi Made Rare Visit to Tibet, China Says
New York Times
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, visited Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.06.15Meeting With Taiwan Reflects Limits of China’s Checkbook
New York Times
For the past eight years, the Chinese government has showered its former enemies in Taiwan with economic gifts.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.04.153 Things Taiwan Wants From China
Time
Here are three issues that are likely to be on the top of Ma’s agenda after seven decades without a face-to-face meeting.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.04.15Call Me Mister: Taiwan, China Presidents to Hold Historic Meeting
CNN
The leaders of Taiwan and China plan to meet in Singapore on Saturday for the first time since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.02.15Q. and A.: Chan Koonchung on Imagining a Non-Communist China
New York Times
We’re in Beijing — no, Beiping — Dec. 10, 1979.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.02.15China, Japan and South Korea Relations 'Completely Restored' After Summit
CNN
"All sides shared the view that trilateral cooperation has been completely restored in this meeting."
ChinaFile Recommends
11.02.15Amartya Sen: Women’s Progress Outdid China’s One-Child Policy
New York Times
The abandonment of the one-child policy in China is a momentous change.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.29.15China to End One-Child Policy, Allowing Families Two Children
New York Times
China’s Communist Party brought to an end the decades-old “one child” policy.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.29.15Two More Japanese Being Held in China, Says Chinese Official
Reuters
"In addition to the two who were arrested, one is being held and one is being watched at home," the official said.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.29.15Yan Lianke: Understand the Enemy
Huffington Post
"I think that my fate cannot be separated from literature."
ChinaFile Recommends
10.26.15India Is Spending Billions to Populate a Remote Area Claimed by China
Bloomberg
"If China is developing on their side of the territory, we should develop on our side."
ChinaFile Recommends
10.23.15Beijing Says Won't Give up Position that Taiwan's Part of China
Reuters
Chinese people have a "sacred mission" to ensure Taiwan is always considered part of China.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.21.15As Britain Greets Xi With Pageantry, Magna Carta Gets Less-Than-Royal Treatment in China
WSJ: China Real Time Report
ChinaFile Recommends
10.16.15Ai Weiwei Memoir Coming in Spring 2017
Newsweek
Crown Publishing Group announced that it will publish a memoir by the artist in the spring of 2017.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15Ancient Teeth Found in China Challenge Modern Human Migration Theory
CNN
Scientists in southern China have discovered human teeth dating back at least 80,000 years.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15The Chinese Oscar Winner that Wasn’t
Foreign Policy
Wolf Totem is a spectacular film, but its soul is missing. That's just how Beijing wants it.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15Mao and Other Cultural Inspirations
New York Times
“An army without culture is a dull-witted army,” Mao Zedong wrote, “and a dull-witted army cannot defeat the enemy.”
ChinaFile Recommends
10.15.15China Burnishes Xi Jinping’s Legend With TV Drama of His Years in Rural Hamlet
Guardian
Chinese bloggers label 45-part drama called Liangjiahe as latest homage to omnipotent ‘Big Daddy Xi’.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.14.15ChinaFile Recommends
10.14.15Survivors Tell the Camera the Hidden Tale of China's Great Famine
Los Angeles Times
When Li Yaqin was 16, she ate what her family could scavenge.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.13.15Japan May Halt Funds for UNESCO Over Nanjing Row With China
Reuters
Japan's military aggression before and during World War Two still haunts ties between Asia's two biggest economies.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.08.15When Palace Museum Meets Creativity
China Daily
In the minds of most people, Emperor and his concubines lived their lives solemnly.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.08.15China Turns Firepower to Soft Power to Try to Win Tiny Taiwan-held Island
Reuters
"In Kinmen, we can do what Taiwan can't, what Taiwan doesn't dare do."
ChinaFile Recommends
10.05.15A Painting of China’s First Lady, Before a Rise to Stardom
New York Times
On the exhibition notes, the painting of Peng Liyuan by Jin Shangyi is identified only as “a well-known singer.”
Sinica Podcast
10.05.15
Edmund Backhouse in the Long View of History
from Sinica Podcast
Edmund Backhouse, the 20th century Sinologist, long-time Beijing resident, and occasional con-artist, is perhaps best known for his incendiary memoirs, which not only distorted Western understanding of Chinese history for more than 50 years, but...
Culture
10.02.15
In Zhang Yimou’s ‘Coming Home’ History is Muted But Not Silent
Coming Home, directed by the celebrated Zhang Yimou and released in the U.S. last week, begins as a man escapes a labor camp in China’s northwest and tries to return home. But he is captured when he and his wife attempt to meet, after their daughter...
ChinaFile Recommends
09.30.15The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
Atlantic
In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed.
ChinaFile Recommends
09.28.15Chinese President Xi Jinping Will Arrive At The UN Armed With A List Of Things He Wants Changed
Quartz
Xi Jinping will make his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
ChinaFile Recommends
09.25.15How A 10-Gallon Hat Helped Heal Relations Between China And America
Washington Post
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's 1979 tour marked a turning point in Americans' views of Communist China.
ChinaFile Recommends
09.24.15Hybrid Warfare With Chinese Characteristics
Diplomat
From Sun Tzu to Xi Jinping: Russia isn’t the only one who knows hybrid warfare.
ChinaFile Recommends
09.21.15China Seeks 'New Model' for Relations with U.S.
BBC
Despite the enormous range and complexity of the US-China relationship, it is becoming ever harder to manage.
Viewpoint
09.03.15The U.S. Was the True Mainstay in the Fight Against Japan in World War II
from China Change
“When the Chinese people and the Chinese nation were in peril, the United States came to the rescue and asked for nothing in return. The U.S. never occupied a single inch of Chinese territory, never reaped any particular reward.”IAt 9:00 a.m. on...
The NYRB China Archive
05.15.15
Mao’s China: The Language Game
from New York Review of Books
It can be embarrassing for a China scholar like me to read Eileen Chang’s pellucid prose, written more than sixty years ago, on the early years of the People’s Republic of China. How many cudgels to the head did I need before arriving at comparable...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.01.15Q. and A.: Francis Fukuyama on China's Political Development
New York Times
Stanford historian argues an effective political system has to balance state capacity against rule of law and democracy.
ChinaFile Recommends
04.29.15Bat-Winged Dinosaur Fossil Discovered in China
USA Today
The new dinosaur is named Yi qi (pronounced "ee chee") and means "strange wing" in Mandarin.
Culture
04.10.15
A New Opera and Hong Kong’s Utopian Legacy
This year, the 43rd annual Hong Kong Arts Festival commissioned a chamber opera in three acts called Datong: The Chinese Utopia. Depicting the life and times of Kang Youwei (1858-1927), a philosopher and reformer of China’s last Qing dynasty, it...
Viewpoint
04.10.15
Bury Zhao Ziyang, and Praise Him
Zhao Ziyang, the premier and general secretary of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1980s, died on January 17, 2005. At a tightly controlled ceremony designed to avoid the kind of instability that the deaths of other controversial...
Sinica Podcast
04.07.15
Cyber Leninism and the Political Culture of the Chinese Internet
from Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo and David Moser speak with Rogier Creemers, post-doctoral fellow at Oxford with a focus on Chinese Internet governance and author of the China Copyright and Media blog.{chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
02.26.15Xi Jinping Hopes to Count in Chinese Political History With ‘Four Comprehensives’ -
Wall Street Journal
Chinese President Xi Jinping has uncorked his own ordinal political philosophy.
ChinaFile Recommends
02.11.15Learn the History of Modern China Through Photobooks
Time
A new book and exhibition reveals the untold history of photobook publishing in China.
Books
02.10.15
Buried Ideas
The discovery of previously unknown philosophical texts from the Axial Age is revolutionizing our understanding of Chinese intellectual history. Buried Ideas presents and discusses four texts found on brush-written slips of bamboo and their seemingly unprecedented political philosophy. Written in the regional script of Chu during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), all of the works discuss Yao’s abdication to Shun and are related to but differ significantly from the core texts of the classical period, such as the Mencius and Zhuangzi. Notably, these works evince an unusually meritocratic stance, and two even advocate abdication over hereditary succession as a political ideal. Sarah Allan includes full English translations and her own modern-character editions of the four works examined: Tang Yú zhi dao, Zigao, Rongchengshi, and Bao xun. In addition, she provides an introduction to Chu-script bamboo-slip manuscripts and the complex issues inherent in deciphering them. —SUNY Press{chop}
Culture
02.04.15
‘This is not that China Story’
James Carter spent much of the 1990s researching the modern history of Harbin, China’s northernmost major city, in the region that is today known as dongbei, the northeast. That region is the subject of Michael Meyer’s forthcoming book, In Manchuria...
ChinaFile Recommends
01.19.155 Takeaways from China’s GDP
Wall Street Journal
For much of the last two decades, China has been working overtime to drive the growth of the world economy. Now, it’s slowing to suborbital speeds.
ChinaFile Recommends
01.14.15In Remote Thai Villages, Legacy of China’s Lost Army Endures
New York Times
At night, traditional Chinese red lanterns illuminate the hotels, shop fronts and Yunnanese-style restaurants lining the main road in this highland village of just over 1,000 people. On one recent evening, as the mist rose off a nearby reservoir,...
Books
12.23.14
Top Five China Books of 2014
As the editor of ChinaFile’s Books section, I have the privilege of meeting and interviewing some amazing writers covering China today—academics, journalists, scholars, activists. Based on these conversations, we create short videos of the...
The NYRB China Archive
12.18.14
China’s Brave Underground Journal—II
from New York Review of Books
In downtown Beijing, just a little over a mile west of the Forbidden City, is one of China’s most illustrious high schools. Its graduates regularly attend the country’s best universities or go abroad to study, while foreign leaders and CEOs make...