Environment
05.24.12
Unplugging from China
from chinadialogue
Apparent preparations by US energy giant AES Corporation to withdraw from China have raised eyebrows lately. Earlier this year, it emerged that the firm—one of the world’s biggest independent power generators—had engaged an investment bank to sell...
Media
05.24.12
TV Show Catches Flak for its Criticism of Contestants Who Have Lived Abroad
The gameshow Fei Ni Mo Shu (Only You) has a pretty straightforward premise: a contestant steps onto a stage next to the host and introduces him/herself to a panel of twelve bosses of major companies who sit in highly extravagant throne-like chairs...
Media
05.24.12
Under the WeiboScope
With more than 300 million registered users, the popular microblogging service Sina Weibo—sometimes called the Chinese Twitter—can offer unique insights into the quotidian musings of Chinese netizens. One way to sort through the barrage of...
Caixin Media
05.23.12
Identity Crisis Rattles Volvo’s Chinese Owner
New models bearing the Chinese-owned Volvo badge shared a luxury spotlight at the Beijing International Auto Show in April with perennial stars Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Lexus.But behind the diamond-studded presentation was confusion over the legal...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.22.12China’s Carbon Market Challenge
chinadialogue
A big question mark still hangs over the accuracy of China’s energy data, in particular its data on coal, use of which is highly decentralised. Without industry-level figures, the ability of local governments to produce reliable energy statistics is...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.22.12Ruihua Popsicles Possibly Tainted, Production Halted
Global Times
Ruihua Old Popsicle, which sells around 50,000 units per day for 1 yuan each, mostly in tourist sites, contains bacteria 1,767 times higher than that stipulated in the national standards for cold beverages, according to the Beijing News.
Viewpoint
05.20.12
Chen Guangcheng: A Hopeful Breakthrough?
The arrival of the celebrated Chinese rights activist, Chen Guangcheng in the U.S. after years of prison and house arrest, raises the larger question of what the whole incident will come to mean in terms of the status of dissidents in China and in U...
Media
05.18.12
Hong Kong Movie Star Now a Motivational Speaker
Nicholas Tse—the famous young Hong Kong singer, actor, and musician—is known for portraying irresponsible young rebels. People think that's what he's like in real life. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology invited Tse to be a...
Media
05.18.12
Drunken Brit Assaults Chinese Woman in Beijing
A drunken foreigner was caught sexually assaulting a Chinese woman in Beijing near the Xuanwumen subway station. Pedestrians stopped him and it ended in a fight. This video shows the initial confrontation with the foreigner and then jumps to the...
Environment
05.18.12Europe Can Do Better
from chinadialogue
Since 2005, the European Union and China have sought to develop dialogue and cooperation in the area of climate-change policy. This has taken place primarily within the framework of the EU-China Partnership on Climate Change, agreed at the 2005 EU-...
Caixin Media
05.18.12Near Three Gorges Dam, the Exodus Continues
Walls inside Zhang Haomin’s home in Zhenxi Township, in Chongqing, started cracking in 2008, around the time the reservoir behind the new Three Gorges Dam neared capacity.“Early on, the cracks were small,” said Zhang, whose home is about three...
Caixin Media
05.18.12
Demography and Destiny
China is facing a demographic reckoning that is approaching a nightmare.For thirty years, the government has been obsessed with keeping population growth down, often resorting to late-term abortions and other brutal measures. The panic now is that...
Caixin Media
05.18.12
Message in a Bottle for Spirits Maker Moutai
A glass of Feitian Moutai packs a wallop, which is one reason why the 106-proof baijiu is a hit among influential government officials.They also like Feitian Moutai because a single bottle, thanks to special arrangements between state agencies and...
Caixin Media
05.18.12
Era Ends for China’s Legendary Stock Picker
Investors who closely followed the stock picks of one of China’s most successful brokers are wandering in the wilderness—and wondering what will happen next to their unemployed luminary Wang Yawei.In April, and without warning, Wang resigned from...
Media
05.17.12
Villagers Loot Spilled Watermelons From Truck After Car Crash
Two trucks collided on the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Expressway in Yueyang, Hunan Province. While local firemen worked to rescue the drivers stuck in their vehicles, people from a nearby village arrived on the scene to loot watermelons that had fallen...
Media
05.16.12
IV Drips Sustain Students Studying for College Entrance Examination
The Xiaogan No.1 High School in China's Hubei Province allegedly hooked students up to intravenous drips filled with amino acids to sustain them while studying for the country's notoriously difficult national college entrance exams:A photo...
Media
05.16.12
Du Fu Is Very Busy
The 1300th birthday anniversary of the great Chinese poet Du Fu will be celebrated this year. An illustration of Du Fu in Chinese literature textbooks has recently been the inspiration for a spat of creative graffiti and videos. In them, he has been...
Environment
05.14.12Keeping an Eye on China’s Bankers
from chinadialogue
Last August, a major pollution story broke in China: 5,000 tonnes of toxic chromium tailings had been dumped near a Yunnan reservoir, contaminating water supplies and killing livestock. Worse revelations were to come. The company behind the incident...
Media
05.11.12
Children Travel on Zip-line Across Abyss To and From School
All 3,369 inhabitants of Hongde Village in Guizhou province, including dozens of school children, must either somehow cross the gorge, or take a detour by walking for several hours, in order to get out of their village. In 2002, a...
Media
05.11.12
Ferrari Stunt Scars 600-Year-Old Monument
Netizens are outraged after a 60-second stunt by car manufacturer Ferrari leaves a 600 year-old historical site marred with skid marks.From Youku
Media
05.11.12
Hospital Staff Forced to Kowtow for Forgiveness at Patient’s Funeral
After a patient died allegedly from medical malpractice in Shaanxi province, the hospital’s president and more than 40 staff members put on heavy mourning garments and attended the patient’s funeral, where the president gave a tearful self-criticism...
Earthbound China
05.11.12
From Protester to Village Head
In September 2011, residents of the village of Wukan in Guangdong province began protesting the illegal seizure and sale of their land by local Party cadres. The protestors demanded fair compensation for the land that had been taken, but officials...
Earthbound China
05.11.12
Wukan Election Photos
While village elections are widespread in China, it’s rare for the Party not to exert pressure over the selection of candidates. When the Guangdong province village of Wukan held elections in February and March 2012, however, they were notably free...
Earthbound China
05.10.12
Wukan Struggle
While village elections are widespread in China, it’s rare for the Party not to exert pressure over the selection of candidates. When the Guangdong province village of Wukan held elections in February and March 2012, however, they were notably free...
Caixin Media
05.09.12
Along the Xiang, It’s Toxic from the Tap
Water flowing from the Xiang River into the faucets of Hunan Province homes has been dangerous for decades. The central government first classified the river’s water as toxic in the 1980s. But the river was being called the most polluted in China as...
Out of School
05.04.12In the Journals: Journal of Asian Studies, February 2012
The February 2012 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies opens with a trio of short articles exploring major trends in China-related publishing over the past decade. The essays, which differ widely in topic, are connected by a concern with how...
Caixin Media
05.04.12
The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan
On a balmy, moonlit evening in the autumn of 2010, I took my son out to Yuanmingyuan to wander among the ruins. The 150th anniversary of the destruction of “The Garden of Perfect Brightness”—often called the Old Summer Palace—was approaching and I...
Caixin Media
05.04.12
Chinese Firms Try Scoring with Spanish Soccer
When NBA journeyman Damon Jones signed a shoe deal with sporting goods maker Li Ning in 2006, he became the first in a long line of American basketball players to win a sponsorship from a Chinese company.Today, China’s Peak Sport Products leads...
Caixin Media
05.02.12
Garish Flowers of War
The Flowers of War begins December 13, 1937, with young convent girls fleeing for their lives through a besieged Nanjing shrouded in mist. The first words heard are those of the lead girl Shujuan: “Everybody was running that day but no one could...
Caixin Media
05.02.12
Yearning for the Yuan
London is forging ahead with plans for yuan-based financial services by developing an infrastructure and banking services that match its ambitions for the Chinese currency.On April 18, the city welcomed the first yuan-denominated bond issuance...
Culture
05.01.12
China Through An Independent Lens
Chinese documentaries have gained global attention in the past decade or so, thanks partly to the creative originality of young filmmakers and partly to a rapidly changing China that fascinates viewers from around the world. Wang Bing’s nine-hour...
Caixin Media
04.25.12
Watery Grave for Yangtze River Fish
(Beijing)—Fishermen along the banks of the mighty Yangtze River have long spoken of emptier nets and longer waits for a catch.On April 2, an unusual auction held in a downstream city in Jiangsu Province added weight to their bleak reports: A single...
Caixin Media
04.24.12China’s Tax Burden: A Mysterious Lead Sinker
(Beijing)—In much of the world, admiration and envy are common reactions to China’s consistently high GDP growth rates.
But closer to home, the Chinese public’s admiration of their own economic miracle is shadowed by tax increases that...
Culture
04.21.12A Gift from Bill Gates
from Chutzpah!
My name is Thousands (“Yiqianji”) and I’ve worked in all sorts of jobs. Most recently, I’ve been spending my time at home writing, and in my spare time, help my mother out picking vegetables. (With the recession, a good job’s hard to find.) Every...
Culture
04.21.12A Pension Plan, a Story by Ha Jin
from Chutzpah!
It was said that Mr. Sheng suffered from a kind of senile dementia caused by some infarction in his brain. I was sure it was neither Parkinson’s nor Alzheimer’s, because I had learned quite a bit about both during my training to be a health aide. He...
Caixin Media
04.19.12Strategic Reserves
(Beijing)—In an odd twist for China’s powerful banks, the biggest state-owned lenders last year started running low on the foreign currency needed for loans to enterprises investing overseas.“Some commercial banks suspended U.S. dollar loans” after...
Earthbound China
04.18.12
What Wukan Means
It began, in the early stages, as a secret mobilization. Then came the protests, marches of ever-larger numbers, direct confrontation, occupations, blockades, anarchy, media exposure, a case of accidental death, the involvement of higher levels of...
Caixin Media
04.18.12
Unscathed by Scandals, Official Promoted
{vertical_photo_right}(Beijing)—Although sacked once for the coverup of the 2003 SARS epidemic and a second time for blocking media coverage of the 2008 Shanxi mudslides, Meng Xuenong’s career has always bounced back.According to the website of the...
Culture
04.09.12
What Gu Dexin Left
Last Saturday the museum I direct in Beijing opened a show by China’s most important contemporary artist you’ve never heard of, Gu Dexin. The opening however had one major difference from the star-studded affairs that have become commonplace in the...
Caixin Media
04.09.12Dalian Businessman Who Built an Empire Vanishes
(Dalian)—The sudden disappearance of a self-made billionaire in the coastal city of Dalian has unnerved not only bank executives concerned about loans they made to his companies, but also government officials who have lent generous support to the...
Culture
04.06.12
Three Poems by Han Dong
from Chutzpah!
Foggy It’s foggy, or smoky Perhaps it’s smog No one’s surprised by that You can look straight into the sun, floating Like the moon in ashen clouds No one’s surprised by that This morning is no different from other mornings Yesterday and...
Caixin Media
04.06.12
China: The Worst Place To Retire
China is facing a crisis over providing for the elderly as its population ages and the supply of labor diminishes.The Beijing News reported in late March that state-run homes for the elderly in the capital are overcrowded. One had 7,000 applicants...
Caixin Media
04.01.12China’s African Challenge
Roughly 1 million Chinese nationals are working or doing business in Africa, from Egypt’s Mediterranean shore to the Cape of Good Hope.Theirs are the faces behind China’s soaring direct investment in Africa, which, according to the Ministry of...
Caixin Media
03.29.12
Give Wenzhou What It Needs
The development of China's private economy requires financial support, especially private financial support. Wenzhou is the home of the private economy. With 99.5 percent of companies falling into the category of small and micro enterprises,...
Culture
03.27.12
Wu Fei: An Authentic Voice
Wu Fei is a Beijing-born composer, vocalist, and guzheng (Chinese zither) player. Her music career tracks a journey from East to West and back again. Born into a musical family, she started playing guzheng as a child. After graduating from the China...
Caixin Media
03.27.12Wang Shu, Wary of the New
At a time when China was bursting with an urge to cover buildings in shimmering silver and gray, Wang Shu, the first Chinese winner of the Pritzker Prize, was an architect who felt that changing tastes didn’t have to mean changing one’s sense of...
Out of School
03.26.12
Re-Reading: The Good Earth
The Good Earth simultaneously manages to be both a classic and not very good. This is not, I trust, a controversial statement: Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel suffered a mixed reputation from the start. While many early readers hailed her work for its...
Culture
03.21.12
A Rhythm of His Own
Huang Bo, founder and lead singer of the funk band The Verse, is a Chinese artist who looks to the West for musical and spiritual inspiration. Huang grew up in Changsha and moved to Guangzhou in the 1990s to study oil painting at the Guangzhou...
Caixin Media
03.19.12
Fair Trade
A typically opaque investigation can begin with a tip from a Shanghai Stock Exchange official and end with a ten-year jail term for a businessman convicted of insider trading. What happens in between is a carefully guarded secret.Likewise hidden...
Caixin Media
03.19.12
An Insider's Account of the Wukan Protest
For months, thousands of villagers in Wukan, Guangdong Province, staged large protests over illegal land seizures, rigged elections and official corruption. The unrest started in September, and as the months wore on they attracted nationwide, then...
Caixin Media
03.09.12
Ex-Officials Battle Plan to Build Nuclear Plants
Work on China’s nuclear power plants started picking up again about a year after the Fukushima disaster in Japan. But the meltdown in March 2011 was still fresh on the minds of four retired cadres in Anhui Province’s Wangjiang County.They filed a...
Out of School
02.29.12
A New China Website Helps Dissertations Find Readers
Dissertations dominate the lives of doctoral students. A PhD candidate spends years researching, writing, and editing his or her dissertation, inching toward the day when the whole process is finished. Finally, he or she can leave behind the nagging...
Culture
02.29.12
Wuhan: Left Behind?
from Leap
Many believe that Wuhan, a historic inland port city midway up the Yangtze River, is on the upswing. Yet a week of firsthand observation reveals a youth culture struggling to cope with the city's second-tier identity, leaving questions as to...
Media
02.29.12Three Trends in Public Opinion Online in China
Looking back at China’s Internet in 2011, there were three broad trends that deserve greater attention. The first was a general shift from emotionally-driven nationalist chatter as the defining tone of China’s Internet to more basic attention to...
Culture
02.29.12
Under the Gingko Tree
from Leap
Chongqing is western China’s only centrally administered city. A mountain town where two rivers meet, Chongqing is one of modern Chinese history’s most strategically important strongholds, and also one of the most important sources of contemporary...
Culture
02.28.12
The Educators
from Leap
The question of art education in China, like just about every question in China, is a complicated one, tied to the myriad issues facing a society in the throes of a massive transition. There is no easy solution, and acknowledging the obstacles is a...
Culture
02.28.12
Philosophies of Independence: The Li Xianting Film School
from Leap
Riding the 938 bus out of Beijing’s Guomao station, the Central Business District gradually dissolves on the hour-long journey east to Songzhuang, giving way to a landscape not unlike that found in hundreds of county-level towns across China. An...
Culture
02.22.12
Our Time With Mu Xin
from Leap
At three o'clock in the morning on December 21, 2011, the poet, writer, and painter Mu Xin passed away at the age of eighty-four in his hometown of Wuzhen. In this essay, two filmmakers from New York attempt to reconstruct the six days they...
Out of School
02.22.12
Chinese Law: Using the Past to Escape the Present
Amid the skyscrapers, bullet trains and brio of contemporary China, the Mao era may seem remote. Discussions of Chinese law, for instance, typically consign it to a squib if they acknowledge it at all. But this is a grave mistake. Legal reformers...
Reporting & Opinion
02.01.12
Apple, Cadmium Spill and Poyang Lake
As the world's most valuable public company, Apple has been trying hard to keep up with a world wide cult and demand for its iPhones, iPads and other products. Yet, the pressure on Apple to clean up its supply chain in China has also been...