Photo Gallery
05.06.24
Traces in the Land
The Xiao River rushes deep and clear out of the mountains of southern China into a narrow plain of paddies and villages. For several weeks in August 1967, more than nine thousand people were murdered in this region of Hunan province. Its epicenter...
Photo Gallery
10.04.23
Then Suddenly It Was Gone
Hong Kong photographer Billy H.C. Kwok was eight years old when the United Kingdom handed over control of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Growing up, Kwok witnessed British influence wane and China’s control grow. He has also watched the freedoms...
Photo Gallery
12.16.21
Vanishing Point
The French photographer Patrick Wack first traveled to Xinjiang in 2016. The pictures he made during those visits to Xinjiang between 2016 and 2019 document both the changes wrought by the government campaign of cultural and political repression of...
Photo Gallery
02.04.21
Running on Empty
Dong told me he photographed Beijing last year for the simple reason of wanting to bear witness. Now, he hopes his photos can serve as a memorial to the immense distress and loss, a situation created by its own government’s compulsion for secrecy...
Photo Gallery
11.24.20
A Border Town’s Second Gamble
Maxine greets us from her small apartment, decorated with flowers and a poster of herself. “If you ask me whether I feel like this is Laos or China, I feel like I’m living in China. There are so many Chinese people here,” she says as she brushes her...
Depth of Field
05.15.20
‘A Letter to My Friend under Quarantine in Wuhan’
from Yuanjin Photo
Highlighting Chinese visual storytellers’ coverage of COVID-19 inside China. Some of these storytellers were on the ground documenting the experience of residents and medical workers in Wuhan, the city where the virus first emerged. Other...
Photo Gallery
03.05.20
China’s New Deserts
From Madoi county, a settlement near the headwaters of the Yellow River, our two-car convoy headed out to visit a desert Yang Yong had first viewed through binoculars in 1997. From the roadside, the geologist had seen a small, wind-blown patch of...
Photo Gallery
02.21.20
‘They Feel Like They Can’t Go Home’
In September 2014, while waiting for access to photograph Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, a Chinese photographer who calls himself “Ali” came upon a large group of students from his home country at a local restaurant. He knew that many young Chinese...
Depth of Field
12.31.19
‘Nowhere to Dock’
from Yuanjin Photo
In 2019, Depth of Field showcased stories covering a range of topics: Shi Yangkun’s nostaglic exploration of China’s last collective villages, Zhu Lingyu’s careful and artisitic portrayal of survivors of sexual violence, and cities seen through the...
Photo Gallery
09.13.19
Searching for Home
Balloons over a wire fence, plastic toys hanging from a man-made rock, a few printed tiles on a wall, a pink sleep shirt with a sketch of a butterfly and dandelions: Peng’s photos capture the colorful glimmers of modest, unabashed desire. She seems...
Photo Gallery
07.24.19
‘I Love HK but Hate It at the Same Time’
A central issue many of the Hong Kong people in my portraits are wrestling with is how to define an identity and being challenged in that pursuit by cultural, social, or political pressures. There is a lot of frustration and anger over the recent...
Depth of Field
07.01.19
The Journey of a Bra
from Yuanjin Photo
Many of the photo stories in this edition of Depth of Field cover issues relating to women and gender, including a piece on women from Madagascar married to men in rural Zhejiang province, artistic photo collaborations with women and men who have...
Photo Gallery
05.17.19
Surface Tension
“I never realized that so many Chinese people have tattoos,” says photographer Xu Song, who spent the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016 photographing people at outdoor swimming pools in Beijing with his phone. “When the clothes come off, the secrets...
Photo Gallery
04.26.19
Chiang Mai’s Chinese Transfer Students
On a chilly winter Friday in early 2013, seven-year-old Zou Yanhu came home from school, looking dejected. Yanhu was a first-grader attending a public primary school in Chengdu, Sichuan’s sprawling capital city. His weekend homework was to write...
Photo Gallery
03.12.19
‘I Can’t Sleep: Homage to a Uyghur Homeland’
In the 2000s, New York-based artist Lisa Ross traveled to the city of Turpan in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and photographed local people on the beds that they keep in their fields. The portraits in that series are currently on exhibit...
Depth of Field
02.25.19
Living by the Rivers
from Yuanjin Photo
If the stories in this edition of Depth of Field share a common thread—apart from their distinguished photographic storytelling—it’s their interest in the flux and churn of life in China in 2019, where nothing seems fixed and pressure of constant...
Photo Gallery
02.12.19
The Face of China’s #MeToo Movement Enters the Fray
In the summer of 2014, Zhou Xiaoxuan, then a 21-year-old living in Beijing, filed a report with the local police. She described what had happened the previous day when she had delivered a basket of fruit to one of China’s most prominent news anchors...
Photo Gallery
12.27.18
Cut Chives
2018 gave us many opportunities to look back at China’s past—the tenth anniversary of Sichuan earthquake and of the Beijing Olympics, the 40th year since the country began its policy of Reform and Opening. This year also brought changes that thrust...
Infographics
11.19.18
What Chinese Charities Are Facing, in One Easy Chart
Earlier this year, the China-based organization NGOCN released the results of a survey to determine how friendly the policy environment is for non-governmental charity groups across China. NGOCN surveyed domestic Chinese non-profits in 10 cities,...
Depth of Field
11.16.18
Where Do Bicycles Go When They Die?
from Yuanjin Photo
In this issue of Depth of Field: the dying art of tomb burials; bike graveyards; and a son’s 20,000 photos of his mother.
Photo Gallery
10.19.18
The Choreographed Global Journey of Your Household Products
U.S.-China trade is not merely a political question; it exists within a massive system that has been built over decades, the accretive results of countless choices by governments, businesses, consumers, and workers. It is at once a heaving,...
Photo Gallery
10.11.18
Reform or Ruin: Chinese Cities on the Edge
China’s rapid industrialization has both led to, and been driven by, resource cultivation and extraction of breathtaking scope. But what happens when the resources run out?For many Chinese cities, local natural resources are a wellspring of jobs,...
Video
09.07.18
From Pimp to Politician
from Arrow Factory Video
Walking through Kabukichō, a densely packed red-light district in Tokyo, one sometime spots 58-year-old Li Xiaomu, eager to point tourists to a good time. Born in the city of Changsha, Hunan province, Li moved to Tokyo in 1988 to study fashion...
Infographics
08.15.18
Visualizing China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign
“Catching Tigers and Flies” is ChinaFile’s interactive tool for tracking and, we hope, better understanding the massive campaign against corruption that Xi Jinping launched shortly after he came to power in late 2012. It is designed to give users a sense of the scope and character of the anti-corruption campaign by graphically rendering information about more than 2,000 of its targets whose cases have been publicly announced in official Chinese sources.
Video
08.08.18
The Window
I have spent three years collecting accounts and examining how survivors and families have coped since that traumatic event. I document the lingering pain, to resist public forgetting and indifference. Hundreds of photographs bear witness to the...
Depth of Field
06.28.18
Staying on Point in Rural China
from Yuanjin Photo
In this edition of Depth of Field: aspiring ballerinas, what’s beneath the gilt in a rich Zhejiang town, worn out doctors, disappearing schools, melting snow, data farms, and the powerful appeal of dancing outdoors.
Photo Gallery
06.20.18
Playing to Win
Zhang Xiaowu grew up and has lived his whole life in Rui’an, where he works as a full-time art teacher and a part-time documentary photographer. Located in China’s eastern coastal Zhejiang province, Rui’an used to be predominantly rural. In 1987, as...
Photo Gallery
05.16.18
Out of the Ashes, a Family Rises Again
The August 2015 Tianjin explosion claimed 173 lives, and the 24-year-old firefighter Pang Ti was one of them. That disaster at a chemical warehouse, caused by mismanagement and lax oversight, put his parents Pang Fangguo and Fang Zhiying among the...
Video
05.07.18
Ou Chen’s Good Run
from Arrow Factory Video
The number of Chinese racers has risen dramatically—a phenomenon that Chinese media call a “marathon fever.” Obed Tiony, a Kenyan studying at Shanghai University, works as an agent for some 300 runners from Kenya and its neighbor Ethiopia. Tiony’s...
Photo Gallery
04.11.18
23 Days, 1,300 Miles, and Some Very High Expectations
“We were at an altitude of 15,000 feet on Mount Haizi. It started to hail. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees. We were only wearing t-shirts. They didn’t stop biking.” It was photographer Wang He’s second time on the Tibetan Plateau. The first...
Depth of Field
04.02.18
Slow Trains, Shrinking Boomtowns, and Men Who Know Ice
from Yuanjin Photo
In this issue of Depth of Field, we take a ride on one of China’s slowest trains, meet the workers who cut the ice for Harbin’s winter festival, and follow two mentally disabled “sent-down youth” on a rare trip home to visit their families. Also:...
Depth of Field
02.20.18
When You Give a Kid a Camera
from Yuanjin Photo
This dispatch of photojournalism from China cuts across a broad spectrum of society, from film screenings in Beijing for the visually impaired to an acrobatics school 200 miles south, in Puyang, Henan province, and from children in rural Sichuan to...
Infographics
01.19.18
China According to Trump
Keeping up with the Trump administration’s statements on China and U.S.-China relations can be hard work. ChinaFile has just made it easier. Our new interactive database contains a growing collection of quotations from the President and senior...
Photo Gallery
12.27.17
A Picture of China in 2017
“When I look back at 2017 in China, I see faces,” ChinaFile Visuals Editor Muyi Xiao says. “Some are ambitious, some are earnest, some are upset, some are lost, and some wear expressions I can’t put in words; their fates are intertwined with that of...
Photo Gallery
12.20.17
I’m Here to Meet a Wife
The Fei doctrine goes something like this: Chinese girls love Korean TV shows, saccharine melodramas like Boys Over Flowers or Hi! School: Love On, where men are romantics or rakes, and women are always drama queens. On screen, resistance is not...
Depth of Field
11.20.17
Fake Girlfriends, Chengdu Rappers, and a Chow Chow Making Bank
from Yuanjin Photo
Lonely dog owners in Beijing and a rented girlfriend in Fujian; the last Oroqen hunters in Heilongjiang and homegrown hip hop in Chengdu; young Chinese in an Indian tech hub and Hong Kong apartments only slightly larger than coffins—these are some...
Video
10.31.17
Down From the Mountains
At 14 years old, Wang Ying doesn’t want to be a mother. She scowls darkly as her younger brother and sister squabble in the corner while she does the housework. But she grudgingly cleans up after them and cooks them a potato stew, which they eat...
Video
10.11.17
The Town at the Heart of China’s Black Market in Ivory
from Environmental Investigation Agency
Last year, in response to mounting criticism for its key role in the steep decline in the world’s elephant population, China announced that it would ban ivory trading and shutter all of the country’s 177 licensed ivory processing companies and...
Video
09.19.17
I Married a Beautiful Ukrainian Woman and So Can You
from Arrow Factory Video
Mei Aisi owes his business to his Internet celebrity, and his celebrity to his wife. Before he met her, Mei, a working-class native of the northern Chinese city of Chengde, didn’t have much going for him. He’d scored poorly on China’s college...
Photo Gallery
09.08.17
Showing the Dead a Good Time
This photo gallery is part of Tomoko Kikuchi’s “Drag Queens for the Dearly Departed,” a project she shot as an Abigail Cohen Fellow in Documentary Photography. Too see the other parts of this project, including an introductory essay by Ian Johnson,...
Depth of Field
08.03.17
Inspirational Vandalism, Theme Parks, and the Man Who Swam to Hong Kong
from Yuanjin Photo
This month, five photo galleries explore different aspects of public and private space in contemporary China. Wu Yue meets a couple who swam to Hong Kong from Guangzhou during the Cultural Revolution and still find solace in the waters of Hong Kong’...
Video
07.27.17
Where The Streets Had My Name
If you’re not dead yet and you were never very famous, can you still get a street named after you in Beijing? You can if you’re 27-year-old artist Ge Yulu. Open Google Maps, enter his name, and there you will find a 1,476-foot-long street that...
Depth of Field
06.29.17
Love, Robots, and Fireworks
from Yuanjin Photo
Included in this Depth of Field column are stories of love, community, remembrance, and the future, told through the discerning eyes of some of China’s best photojournalists. Among them, the lives of African migrants in Guangzhou, seven years inside...
Photo Gallery
06.21.17
Inside the World of Chinese Bitcoin ‘Mining’
From the outside, the buildings with the bright tin roofs don’t look like places where money is made. High in the remote mountains of the region of China’s Sichuan province that borders Tibet, economic life has mostly centered on grazing and...
Depth of Field
05.01.17
From the Inside Looking Out
from Yuanjin Photo
Each March, Beijing hosts the “Two Sessions,” massive meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Members of the two bodies of the nation’s legislature meet for a week in the Great Hall of...
Video
04.19.17
Trafficked into Wedlock
When Buntha left Cambodia to marry a Chinese man, she did so for money, not for love.Thirty-two years old at the time, and never married, she had few opportunities to earn money for her family in her village in Kampong Cham, Cambodia. The China she...
Photo Gallery
04.03.17
The Monster Fight Club
“I was supposed to be fighting some IT guy,” Bo Junhui groaned afterward. Instead, the 18-year-old student was up against someone a year older, ten pounds heavier, and a lot hungrier. Xia Tian has never worked behind a desk; he’d spent the last few...
Depth of Field
03.22.17
Refugees from Myanmar, Migrant Workers, and the Lantern Festival
from Yuanjin Photo
This month, we feature galleries published in February that showcase photographers’ interest in China’s borders and its medical woes, the lives of its minorities and their traditions and customs, and—in the case of Dustin Shum’s work—in a visual...
Depth of Field
02.16.17
Riding into the New Year
from Yuanjin Photo
As preparations for the Chinese New Year got underway, Liang Yingfei set up a roadside studio and asked migrants traveling home by motorbike to stop for a quick photograph. While in Cambodia for the Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops, Jia...
Depth of Field
01.17.17
House Calls on the Tibetan Plateau, Children of Divorce, Celebrity Secrets
from Yuanjin Photo
In the final galleries of 2016, the publishing juggernaut Tencent again shows its leadership in the documentary photography space, but iFeng’s choice to publish a personal photo gallery by Zhou Xin is also worth a good look, especially since...
Photo Gallery
12.21.16
Seeing 2016 Through Eyes on China
In June 2015, a couple dozen China-based photographers—some Chinese, some not—founded the Instagram account Eyes on China. Their goal, as member photographer Gilles Sabrié put it, was to collectively create “a diverse, dynamic, and objective view”...
Photo Gallery
12.08.16
Nursing An Old Flame
from Tencent QQ
Walking onto the factory floor, one finds a busy scene amid the thundering of machines. Sections of wood are being turned into thin matchsticks, and as they pass through the noisy machines, each is topped with a “little red cap.” A group of women...
Depth of Field
12.06.16
From West Africa, the Czech Republic, and Home
from Yuanjin Photo
In this month’s Depth of Field, Chinese photojournalists explore foreign terrain, both beyond China’s borders and within them. Independent photographer Yuyang Liu traveled the open seas to document the lives of Chinese and African workers who fish...
Photo Gallery
11.15.16
Same Tough Start, Radically Different Lives
According to my caretakers at the orphanage, Chunchun arrived a few years before I did, when she was a baby. They estimate that I was around three or four years old at the time of my arrival, howling and screaming at the top of my lungs. I had been...
Depth of Field
11.08.16
Dongbei’s Last Match Factory, Capital Straphangers, Retracing the Long March...
from Yuanjin Photo
In October, several publications marked the 80th Anniversary of the Chinese Communists’ Long March. We have chosen two stories that revisited this event and that were standouts, visually. Elsewhere, photographers followed stories both large and...
Depth of Field
10.18.16
Over-Protective Mothers, E-cigarettes, Sports Hunting, and More
from Yuanjin Photo
A photojournalist’s job is to capture the unique and the universal—to portray brief moments that tell individual stories, yet are instantly relatable to a wide audience. The delightful task of curating that type of Chinese photojournalism is the...
Photo Gallery
10.05.16
Beijing’s Skinheads
from Jiemian
Punk, as with most modern Western rock music, took root in China abruptly and unevenly starting in the early 1990s. Beijing skinhead Ma Ke—pictured here with a teardrop temporary tattoo—was born in 1976, around the same time as punk itself. One of...
Depth of Field
09.12.16
African Migrants in Guangzhou, Forgetting, Family Planning’s Fate, and More...
from Yuanjin Photo
Photographing the aftermath of catastrophic events is challenging—one that photographer Mu Li handles with creativity and grace looking back at the chemical explosion in Tianjin that damaged as many as 17,000 homes August 12, 2015. Another challenge...
Depth of Field
08.08.16
Creating Internet Celebrities, Personal Shoppers, Queer Life, and More
from Yuanjin Photo
Natural disasters and trend stories are the bread and butter of photojournalists and July was no exception. We bring you the work of photographers who explored the burgeoning world of cellphone celebrities, waded into flood-struck areas, and...
Photo Gallery
07.28.16
Bakugai!
History has not favored power-sharing on the world’s most populated continent. For millennia, China dominated as East Asia’s greatest force, its culture shaping civilizations across the region. In a more recent era, Japan reigned, boasting the...