China Closes School ‘Teaching Women to Be Obedient’

BBC
Chinese authorities have shut down an institute that was teaching women to be obedient and subordinate to men.

Features

09.08.17

A Drag Queen for the Dearly Departed

Ian Johnson & Tomoko Kikuchi
In the good old days, about three thousand years ago, people really knew how to mourn the dead. That was back in the Zhou dynasty, when there was no laughing in the dead person’s house, no sighing while eating, and no singing while walking down a...

China’s New Tool for Social Control: A Credit Rating for Everything

Josh Chin and Gillian Wong
Wall Street Journal
Beijing wants to give every citizen a score based on behavior such as spending habits and filial piety, which can bar citizens from loans, jobs, air travel

What Does a Fried Chicken Restaurant Have to do With Prostitution? China Wants to Know

Echo Huang
Quartz
One business in China is learning that a play on words can get it in trouble with the government

Environment

04.02.15

‘Wolf Totem’ Trainer Sees Risks, Rewards for Hollywood in China

from chinadialogue
Wolf trainer Andrew Simpson has just wrapped up three years in Beijing coaching wolves to perform in the film version of the novel Wolf Totem. The Sino-French adaptation of Jiang Rong’s best-selling 2004 novel opened in Beijing and Europe in...

Media

10.10.14

China Bans Law-Breaking Actors From Movies and Television

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
Amid an ongoing government campaign against drugs, prostitution, and other moral vices, a powerful government agency has reportedly issued new regulations banning actors with histories of drug use or prostitution from appearing in movies and...

Sinica Podcast

04.07.14

In Conversation with Timothy Garton Ash

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn are pleased to host a conversation with Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of History at Oxford University and recent participant in the Capital M Literary Festival in Beijing. As one the world's...

Chinese Atheists? What the Pew Survey Gets Wrong

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Earlier this month, I came across a fascinating opinion survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. The report asked people in forty countries whether belief in God is necessary for morality. Mostly, the results aren’t surprising...

China’s Way to Happiness

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Richard Madsen is one of the modern-day founders of the study of Chinese religion. A professor at the University of California San Diego, the seventy-three-year-old’s works include Morality and Power in a Chinese Village, China and the American...

Amid China’s Anti-Extravagance Sweep

James T. Areddy, Fanfan Wang
Wall Street Journal
Chinese hotels are downgrading to attract business from officials who are limited by “morality” campaigns.

Confucius Comes Home

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher.

Xi Jinping Hopes Traditional Faiths Can Fill Moral Void in China

Benjamin Kang Lim and Ben Blanchard
Reuters
President Xi Jinping believes China is losing its moral compass and he wants the ruling Communist Party to be more tolerant of traditional faiths in the hope these will help fill a vacuum created by the country’s breakneck growth...

Rage, Smelly Socks and Stolen Wine in China’s Skies

Adam Minter
Bloomberg
A look at the recent high volume of unruly behavior from flight passengers, and how it reflects on the “national character" of the Chinese people.

Sinica Podcast

06.08.12

Morally Adrift?

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
It’s easy to get depressed about China’s apparent drift toward amorality: the kind of pervasive screw-your-neighbor approach to getting ahead (or even just getting by) that seems increasingly common on the mainland. The news is full of horrific...

Sinica Podcast

08.13.10

The Guo Degang Affair and China Apologists

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, Jeremy Goldkorn, Gady Epstein, Will Moss, and David Moser join Kaiser to talk about the Guo Degang Affair. When a fight with the media at the famous comedian’s house became news, the incident sparked a week of heated public...