Reports

05.01.08

Communicable Disease Risk Assessment and Interventions

World Health Organization
Luo Xiaoyuan
World Health Organization
Communicable disease risk assessments are written and produced rapidly in response to acute humanitarian emergencies resulting from natural disasters, sudden conflict or civil strife. Risk assessments identify the communicable disease threats faced...

Reports

04.12.08

Denied Status, Denied Education: Children of North Korean Women in China

Human Rights Watch
This report delves into the situation of the children of undocumented North Korean refugees and Chinese nationals in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. It explains that many children of North Korean parents are not able to be registered with...

Reports

04.04.08

Security Implications of Taiwan’s Presidential Election of March 2008

Shirley Kan
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
Taiwan’s presidential election of March 22, 2008 indicates a reduction in future cross-strait tension, as winner Ma Ying-jeou is less provocative toward Beijing than Chen Shui-bian has been. The near-term outlook for Taiwan’s future is positive for...

He Would Have Changed China

Perry Link from New York Review of Books
In trying to make sense of their country’s turbulent modern history, Chinese intellectuals sometimes resort to counterfactual speculation. How might things have been different if one or another accidental event had happened differently? For decades...

Reports

04.02.08

Taiwan’s 2008 Presidential Election

Kerry Dumbaugh
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
In a large turnout on March 22, 2008, voters in Taiwan elected as president Mr. Ma Ying-jeou of the Nationalist (KMT) Party. Mr. Ma out-polled rival candidate Frank Hsieh, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), by a 2.2 million...

Reports

04.01.08

Real and Financial Sector Linkages in China and India

Jahangir Aziz
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
In the spirit of what is known as business cycle accounting, this paper finds that the investment wedge—the gap between household rates of intertemporal substitution and the marginal product of capital—is large and quantitatively significant in...

Reports

04.01.08

A Real Model of Transitional Growth and Competitiveness in China

Leslie Lipschitz, Céline Rochon, and Geneviève Verdier
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The authors present a stylized real model of the Chinese economy with the objective of explaining two features: (1) domestic production is highly competitive in the sense that an accumulation of capital that raises the marginal product of labor...

Reports

04.01.08

Walking on Thin Ice: Control, Intimidation and Harassment of Lawyers in China

Human Rights Watch
While major gains have been made in terms of the rule of law over the past thirty years, this report from Human Rights Watch details consistent patterns of abuses against legal practitioners. These include intimidation, harassment, suspension of...

Reports

03.01.08

People’s Republic of China: The Olympics Countdown—Crackdown on Activists Threatens Olympics Legacy

Amnesty International
With little more than four months to go before the Beijing Olympics, few substantial reforms have been introduced that will have a significant, positive impact on human rights in China. This is particularly apparent in the plight of individual...

Reports

03.01.08

Hong Kong SAR as a Financial Center for Asia: Trends and Implications

Cynthia Leung and Olaf Unteroberdoerster
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
We document Hong Kong SAR's evolving role as an international financial center in the Asia region, the importance of the growing special link with China as well as supply-side advantages, and outline the scope for future financial services...

Reports

03.01.08

Advancing Food Safety in China

Kennett Werner
United Nations
Over the past year, intense media attention has focused on food safety in the People’s Republic of China. Since the headlines broke, the government of China has been quick to respond, both highlighting the work it was already doing and taking many...

He Won’t Give In

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
On June 4, 1989, having heard that the Tiananmen demonstrations had been lethally crushed, Kang Zhengguo, a professor of literature at a university in Shaanxi province, pinned a piece of paper to his chest displaying the words “AIM YOUR GUNS HERE.”...

Reports

02.13.08

How Large is China’s Economy? Does it Matter?

Wayne M. Morrison, Michael F. Martin
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
China’s rapid economic growth since 1979 has transformed it into a major economic power. Over the past few years, many analysts have contended that China could soon overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy, based on estimates...

Reports

01.22.08

Taiwan’s Legislative Elections, January 2008: Implications for U.S. Policy

Kerry Dumbaugh
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
On January 12, 2008, Taiwan’s ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), suffered a crushing defeat in elections for the Legislative Yuan, the national legislature. The DPP won only twenty-seven seats in the new 113-member body, while the...

The Quiet Heroes of Tibet

Pankaj Mishra from New York Review of Books
Earlier this year, shortly before boarding the new Chinese train from Beijing to Lhasa, I met Woeser, a Tibetan poet and essayist (she uses only one name). Unusual among Tibetans in China, who tend to avoid talking to foreigners, she spoke frankly...

Reports

01.10.08

Prospects for Democracy in Hong Kong: China’s December 2007 Decision

Michael F. Martin
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
The prospects for democratization in Hong Kong became clearer following a decision of the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (NPCSC) on December 29, 2007. The NPCSC’s decision effectively set the year 2017 as the earliest date...

Reports

01.01.08

China’s Green Buildings and Sustainable Cities

Natural Resources Defense Council
The National Resources Defense Council is documenting the way in which it is promoting environmentally friendly growth principles in urban planning in China. This includes it partnership with Chinese governmental organizations in promoting and...

Reports

01.01.08

External Evaluation 2003–2007 - Safety and Effectiveness of Contraception in China

Barbara L.K. Pillsbury and William Winfrey
Luo Xiaoyuan
World Health Organization
HRP has a long history of successful collaboration in China. WHO is widely respected in that country, and HRP benefits from its prestige. Since 1979, HRP has helped establish and strengthen a network of research institutes and provided support to...

‘Ravished by Oranges’

Simon Leys from New York Review of Books
How can we be informed? Chesterton famously observed that when we read in today’s newspapers that one window-cleaner fell to his death, our general understanding of window-cleaning is distorted; the information that 35,000 window-cleaners actually...

The Amazing Wanderer

Christian Caryl from New York Review of Books
1.I could tell you a lot of potentially useful things about Colin Thubron’s latest travel memoir—for example, that he’s a gifted linguist, a dogged reporter, and an elegant writer. For a start, though, perhaps it’s enough to point out that his shoes...

Reports

12.01.07

Africa-China-U.S. Trilateral Dialogue

"The Brenthurst Foundation, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Council on Foreign Relations, Leon H. Sullivan Foundation
He Jianan
Council on Foreign Relations
Over the course of the last thirteen months, delegates from Africa, China, and the United States have met three times in an effort to identify strategies of cooperation among their respective nations with the goal of accelerating economic...

Reports

12.01.07

Wanjiazhai Water Transfer Project: Key Factors and Assesment

World Bank
China's impressive economic performance since 1978 with a growth rate of GDP of 9.5 percent per year has been mainly in the industrial and commercial sectors and is concentrated in urban areas; as a result, urban water demand has increased by...

Reports

12.01.07

High Growth and Low Consumption in East Asia: How to Improve Welfare While Avoiding Financial Failures

Andrew Feltenstein, Céline Rochon, and Maral Shamloo
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
This paper analyzes certain policies that are typical of a number of rapidly growing East Asian countries in which a fixed exchange rate, combined with a surplus labor market, has made domestic assets relatively inexpensive, generating high rates of...

China’s Area of Darkness

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
The very first anonymous star on the CIA’s wall of honor at Langley, Virginia (the agency rarely identifies its dead heroes), refers to Douglas MacKiernan, the agency’s man in Urumqi, the capital of what is now called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous...

Reports

11.01.07

China's Changing Trade Elasticities

Jahangir Aziz and Xiangming Li
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
In recent years, much has been written about the China's rising current account surplus and the importance of its exchange rate policy. At the same time, the increasing integration of China into the global economy has raised questions about how...

Reports

10.15.07

Securing Land Rights for Chinese Farmers

Zhu Keliang and Roy Prosterman
Cato Institute
Despite China's significant economic growth, most of the 700 million farmers that make up about 56% of the total population still lack secure and marketable land rights that would allow them to make long-term investment in land in order to...

Reports

10.01.07

The Dispute Resolution Process in Relation to Logging Permits in China

Li Ping
Landesa
This paper focuses on questions related to the granting of logging permits in China. The author finds the current system for the granting of logging permits in China to be lacking. In order to find a solution to this issue, the author reviews...

Reports

10.01.07

What Drives China’s Growing Role in Africa?

Jian-Ye Wang
Sara Segal-Williams
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
What role does China play in Africa’s development? What drives China’s increasing economic involvement in the continent? This paper attempts to provide a quantified assessment of China’s multifaceted influence as market, donor, financer and investor...

Reports

10.01.07

The Impact of Regulatory Takings by the Chinese State on Rural Land Tenure and Property Rights

Li Ping
He Jianan
Landesa
With the realization of China’s rapid ecological deterioration, partly caused by irresponsible logging, the Chinese government has in recent years taken a series of drastic measures to improve forest coverage. One important approach was to declare...

Reports

09.01.07

The Shifting Structure of China's Trade and Production

Li Cui and Murtaza Syed
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
This paper uses disaggregated trade data to assess how the expansion of China's production capacity and its changing production structure may be affecting its trade linkages with other countries. It finds that China is moving away from...

Reports

08.27.07

A Guide on Sustainable Overseas Silviculture by Chinese Enterprises

He Jianan
Global Environmental Institute
This report prescribes the fundamental principles to observe in sustainable forestry maintenance, or silviculture, and the basic requirements for the Chinese enterprises engaged in realizing sustainable silviculture. The Guide applies to regulating...

Reports

07.01.07

Guarding Against Fiscal Risks in Hong Kong SAR

Nathan Porter
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The Hong Kong SAR's government faces the dual challenges of volatile revenue and medium term spending pressures arising from a rapidly aging population. Age-related spending pressures raise long-run sustainability concerns, while revenue...

Reports

07.01.07

Explaining China's Low Consumption: The Neglected Role of Household Income

Jahangir Aziz and Li Cui
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The Chinese government has recently focused on the need to increase consumption to rebalance the economy. A widely held view is that despite China's remarkably high growth, the share of consumption in total expenditure has been low and...

Reports

06.30.07

China, the Philippines, and U.S. Influence in Asia

Renato Cruz De Castro
Sara Segal-Williams
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
During his January 2007 visit to Manila, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared that Sino-Philippine relations are experiencing a “golden age of partnership” as the two countries upgrade bilateral...

Reports

06.29.07

Hong Kong’s Return to Chinese Sovereignty: Ten Years On

Amnesty International
Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997 after more than one hundred years as a British colony. This report looks at how certain basic human rights have fared since the handover and assesses how far the HKSAR government has taken the...

The Dream of Catholic China

Jonathan D. Spence from New York Review of Books
From the later sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth, the Jesuit educational system was the most rigorous and effective in Europe. As one senior Jesuit wrote proudly in 1647, each Jesuit college was a “Trojan horse filled with soldiers...

Mission to Mao

Roderick MacFarquhar from New York Review of Books
“This was the week that changed the world” was Richard Nixon’s summing up at the end of his trip to China in February 1972.1 The hyperbole was justified, for this visit to China by an American president was a turning point in the cold war. Hitherto...

Reports

06.12.07

State Secrets: China's Legal Labyrinth

Human Rights in China
This report describes and examines the PRC state secrets system and shows how it allows and even promotes human rights violations by undermining the rights to freedom of expression and information, and by maintaining a culture of secrecy that has a...

Reports

06.01.07

No One Has the Liberty to Refuse: Tibetan Herders Forcibly Relocated in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and the TAR

Sophie Richardson
Human Rights Watch
This report describes the effects on Tibetan herders of Chinese government policies of resettlement, land confiscation, and fencing. The author draws on interviews with about 150 Tibetans from the areas directly affected, including Gansu, Qinghai,...

Reports

05.01.07

Pension Reform in China: The Need for a New Approach

Steven Dunaway and Vivek Arora
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The rapid aging of China's population over the next few decades makes it important for a new pension system with broad and adequate coverage to be put in place quickly. Pension reforms, first initiated in 1997, have become bogged down in...

Reports

04.30.07

Dissident Dissonance

Ellen Bork
Sara Segal-Williams
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
The United States has applied a different standard on human rights and dissent to China than it did to the Soviet Union. Several things explain this. First, beginning in 1972, relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were intended to...

Reports

04.23.07

China’s Anti-Satellite Weapon Test

Shirley Kan
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
On January 11, 2007, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) conducted its first successful direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons test in destroying one of its own satellites in space. The test raised international concerns about more space...

Reports

04.20.07

Underlying Strains in Taiwan-U.S. Political Relations

Kerry Dumbaugh
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
The U.S. policy framework for Taiwan was laid down in 1979 when Washington severed official relations with the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan and instead recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the legitimate Chinese government. The...

Reports

04.01.07

NRDC Strives to Minimize the Toll From Coal in China

Natural Resources Defense Council
NRDC is working with China to reduce this reliance on coal—and cut down on coal's accompanying health and safety hazards—by aggressively targeting energy efficiency and renewable energy goals, and promoting coal gasification with carbon capture...

Reports

04.01.07

NRDC Partners With China on Energy Efficiency

Natural Resources Defense Council
China has launched the most aggressive energy efficiency program in the world to reduce pollution and protect people's health. NRDC is working with key partners at the central and provincial level to help China achieve its ambitious energy...

Reports

04.01.07

U.S.-China Relations

Carla A. Hills, Dennis C. Blair, Frank Sampson Jannuzi
He Jianan
Council on Foreign Relations
The Council on Foreign Relations established an Independent Task Force to take stock of the changes under way in China today and to evaluate what these changes mean for China and for the US-China relationship. Based on its careful assessment of the...

Reports

03.01.07

Internal Migrants: Discrimination and Abuse

Amnesty International
Numbering just two million in the 1980s China's internal migrants are now part of the largest peacetime migration in history, with some experts estimating their numbers to swell to 300 million by 2015. While they have served as laborers fueling...

Reports

03.01.07

Will India Be a Better Strategic Partner Than China?

Dan Blumenthal
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
The Joint Declaration signed on July 18, 2005, by President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been heralded in some quarters as the equivalent of President Richard Nixon’s opening to China. The opening to China under...

Reports

02.01.07

China: Minority Exclusion, Marginalization and Rising Tensions

Human Rights in China
This report documents the serious impediments to the fulfillment of China's human rights obligations, in the areas of ethnic minority political participation, development, and preservation of cultural identity. Given the destabilizing levels of...

Reports

02.01.07

Coal in a Changing Climate

Daniel A. Lashof, Duncan Delano, Jon Devine, Barbara Finamore, Debbie Hammel, David Hawkins, Allen Hershkowitz, Jack Murphy, JingJing Qian, Patrice Simms, Johanna Wald
Barbara A. Finamore
Natural Resources Defense Council
The current coal fuel cycle is among the most destructive activities on earth, placing an unacceptable burden on public health and the environment. There is no such thing as “clean coal.” As the two largest coal consumers, the United States and...

Reports

01.13.07

Is China a Threat to the U.S. Economy?

Craig K. Elwell, Marc Labonte
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
The rise of China from a poor, stagnant country to a major economic power within a time span of only twenty-eight years is often described by analysts as one of the greatest economic success stories in modern times. From 1979 (when economic reforms...

Reports

01.12.07

The State of Wildlife Trade in China

Xu Ling, Liu Xueyan, Meng Meng, Yin Feng, Dick Tong, Timothy Lam, Xu Hongfa, Joyce Wu
World Wildlife
This edition aims to highlight wildlife trade trends in threatened and at-risk wildlife from the past year, with an emphasis on the impact of China’s consumption on globally important biodiversity ‘hotspots.’ Surveys in 2007 found that while illegal...

Reports

01.04.07

China’s Trade with the United States and the World

Thomas Lum, Dick K. Nanto
Peony Lui
Congressional Research Service
As imports from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have surged in recent years, posing a threat to some U.S. industries and manufacturing employment, Congress has begun to focus on not only access to the Chinese market and intellectual property...

Reports

01.01.07

Das (Wasted) Kapital: Firm Ownership and Investment Efficiency in China

David Dollar and Shang-Jin Wei
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Based on a survey that covers a stratified random sample of 12,400 firms in 120 cities in China with firm-level accounting information for 2002-2004, the authors examine the presence of systematic distortions in capital allocation that result in...

Reports

01.01.07

China: Strengthening Monetary Policy Implementation

Bernard J. Laurens and Rodolfo Maino
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The People's Bank of China (PBC) has made great strides in modernizing its monetary policy frameworks, but their effectiveness will diminish as the sophistication of the economy increases. Empirical evidence supports maintaining a reference to...

Reports

12.01.06

Rebalancing China's Economy: What Does Growth Theory Tell Us?

Jahangir Aziz
Sara Segal-Williams
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
This paper uses the standard one-sector neoclassical growth model to investigate why China's consumption has been low and investment high. It finds that the low cost of capital has been quantitatively an important factor. Theory predicts that...

Reports

12.01.06

The Rise of Foreign Investments in Chinese Banks—Taking Stock

Lamin Leigh and Richard Podpiera
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The recent wave of foreign investment in China's banks and the prospects of further opening of the banking sector under the WTO agreement suggest that foreign banks are likely to play an increasingly important role in China. This paper takes...

Reports

11.30.06

America and Japan Approach a Rising China

Dan Blumenthal
Sara Segal-Williams
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
America’s post-Cold War China policy was premised on the hope that multidimensional engagement with Beijing would result in a strong, rich, peaceful, and democratic China. Almost two decades later, America’s attitude toward China reflects the fear...

Chinese Shadows

Perry Link from New York Review of Books
In 1920 a young Chinese poet named Guo Moruo published a poem called “The Sky Dog,” which begins:Ya, I am a sky dog!I have swallowed the moon,I have swallowed the sun.I have swallowed all the planets,I have swallowed the entire universe.I am I!After...

Reports

11.01.06

Can Good Events Lead to Bad Outcomes? Endogenous Banking Crises and Fiscal Policy Responses

Andrew Feltenstein and Céline Rochon
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
A study of the impact of labor market restructuring and foreign direct investment on the banking sector, using a dynamic general equilibrium model with a financial sector. Numerical simulations are performed using stylized Chinese data, and bank...