Media
07.22.14
All Hail ‘Fatty Kim the Third’
It’s North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un as the world has never seen him. In a three-minute clip that has accumulated over 200,000 views after its early July posting on Chinese video site Tudou, a crudely photoshopped Kim dances on the street,...
Media
07.21.14
Everybody Hates Rui
He may be widely reviled in his home country, but oh, what a resume: The son of an author and screenwriter; a graduate of the prestigious China Foreign Affairs University; a Yale World Fellow; and state-run China Central Television (CCTV)’s best-...
Environment
07.17.14The Legacy of Hunan’s Polluted Soils
from chinadialogue
This is the second of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360 with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts one and three.Cao Fushe spent much of 2013...
Environment
07.17.14
China Faces Long Battle to Clean Polluted Soil
from chinadialogue
This is the third of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360 with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts one and two.Luo Jinzhi is 52 and lives in...
Caixin Media
07.15.14
Silencing a Health Reformer’s Voice
Dr. Liao Xinbo is struggling to square his enormous popularity and thirst for healthcare reform with a recent demotion that, in his words, marked the culmination of his frustrated work life.Liao served as Deputy Director of the Guangdong Province...
Environment
07.10.14
U.S.-China Climate Cooperation More Crucial Than Ever
from chinadialogue
As the governments of the United States and China meet in Beijing this week for the Sixth U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), one area worth watching closely is clean energy and climate change cooperation. While this topic may...
Media
07.08.14
Changing the Chinese Embassy’s Address to Liu Xiaobo Plaza Is a Silly Idea
I rarely agree with the Chinese Embassy in Washington, but an amendment making its way through Congress has made me unlikely bedfellows with Beijing’s Washington diplomats.Representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.) has sponsored an amendment to rename the...
Caixin Media
07.08.14
Hard Choices for Family Planners and Parents
The technocrats in charge of China's one-child policy have the power to force sterilizations, abortions, and intra-uterine device (IUD) implants, as well as punish uncooperative parents by denying them jobs, denying their children schooling,...
Environment
07.03.14The Victims of China’s Soil Pollution Crisis
from chinadialogue
This is the first of a special three-part series of investigations jointly run by chinadialogue and Yale Environment 360, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can also read parts two and three.When Zhang Junwei’s uncle died...
Media
07.02.14
The Mogul Takes Manhattan
Lunch at Central Park's Loeb Boathouse is an elegant affair, popular among well-heeled tourists and alumni networking associations for its lakeside view and excellent service. But on Wednesday, June 25, the restaurant hosted hundreds of...
Culture
07.01.14
Inside the Mind of a Chinese Hacker
In May, the U.S. announced the indictment of five Chinese hackers for breaking into the computers of U.S. companies. The men went by code names like UglyGorilla and KandyGoo. A recent report revealed that the hackers, who worked for Unit 61398 of...
Caixin Media
07.01.14
China Pulling the Plug on Foreign Mainframes
E-commerce companies and banks in China are scrapping hardware and uninstalling software for mainframe servers made by American suppliers in favor of homegrown brands said to be safe, advanced, and a lot less expensive.The movement has taken special...
Environment
06.27.14Germany’s Renewables Paradox a Warning Sign for China
from chinadialogue
From the hay field behind his house, Gunter Jurischka points out the solar panels glittering from the town’s rooftops and the towering wind turbines spinning lazily on the horizon.Thanks to Germany’s now famous Energiewende (or “energy transition”)...
Caixin Media
06.24.14
Top Political Advisor Investigated for Graft
A vice chairman of the country's top political advisory body is being investigated for "serious violations of discipline," the Communist Party's anti-graft fighter says.The Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) did not...
Media
06.24.14
The President China Never Had
An activist lawyer heroically risks everything for his beliefs. Although he fails, his brave stand against authoritarianism wins him lasting admiration and changes the fate of his East Asian nation forever. The plot may sound seditious in mainland...
Environment
06.19.14
What China Should Say at the U.N. Climate Change Summit
from chinadialogue
With a little more than 100 days to go, countries are gearing up for Ban Ki-moon’s New York climate summit, the first climate convention of world leaders since Copenhagen and a meeting that aims to catalyze new commitments and mobilize political...
Caixin Media
06.18.14
China’s Retiring Migrant Workers Have No Place to Call Home
A generation of Chinese people from rural areas who moved to the big cities to find work is reaching retirement age, but many are finding they have been left outside the country's urban pension system despite extensive reforms in recent years...
Media
06.18.14
Leaning In ... to Corruption
It's no secret that graft is an essential part of climbing the Chinese Communist Party ranks. Now, according to Chinese state media, ambitious female cadres are increasingly being caught taking bribes and trading favors. On June 16, the state-...
Viewpoint
06.13.14
Arrested Chinese Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang Speaks from Prison
“They bring me in for questioning practically every day. Sometimes the sessions last as long as ten hours. My legs are getting swollen, probably from sitting on a bench without moving for so long.” He said of these grueling interrogation sessions, “...
Environment
06.12.14
The Dead Swans of Dongting Lake
from chinadialogue
I’ve lost track of how many nights I spent traveling to Dongting Lake, a large, shallow lake in Hunan province, central China, famed for being the origin of dragon-boat racing.In mid-January 2013 I met the Yueyang River Porpoise Conservation Society...
Caixin Media
06.10.14
A Jesuit Astronomer in a Qing Emperor’s Court
Of the 920 Jesuits who served in the China mission between 1552 and 1800, only the Italian Matteo Ricci (Li Madou) remains well known. This is understandable—it was Ricci who first gained permission for the Jesuits to live in Beijing and who...
Media
06.05.14A Time-Lapse Map of Protests Sweeping China in 1989
Twenty-five years ago in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, a group of small-town high school students listening to shortwave radio heard news of a deadly crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators nearly 1,000 miles away in the capital of...
Media
06.03.14
A Day to Remember/A Day Forgotten
China’s suppression of the memory of the June 4 massacre of demonstrators in Beijing in 1989 is a perennial and important subject of commentary. Much written on the subject is excellent, but little I’ve seen describes repressed memory in action as...
Viewpoint
06.03.14
China’s Maritime Provocations
Last weekend I attended the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual gathering of Asian, European, and American defense and military officials and strategic experts in Singapore hosted by the London International Institute of Strategic Studies. China sent a...
Culture
06.03.14
A Visit to Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum
Every Saturday in Hong Kong, volunteer curator and translator C.S. Liu helps guide visitors through the first permanent museum dedicated to the history of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989 in Beijing.At the entrance to the June 4th...
Features
06.03.14
Voices from Tiananmen
This Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of the deadly suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen protests on June 4. It has been a quarter of a century of enormous change in China, but one key fact of life in that country has not changed: its leaders...
Features
05.31.14
Resources on the Tiananmen Square Protests: 25 Years Later
This June 4 marks 25 years since the military crackdown on student protestors in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, following months of demonstrations. This resource page includes links to our recently published pieces and to our archived...
Features
05.29.14
Why Defenders of Killer Whales Are Worried About China
Late last year, the circus came to Hengqin. Trained elephants from Thailand, Russian jugglers and monkies, Kazakh horses, Bengal tigers, and Cuban acrobats descended on the once-sleepy island near Macau for China’s “First International Circus...
Caixin Media
05.27.14
Threats to Anonymous Sources Shake Chinese Journalism
Courts in the capital are mulling over what's being described as the first legal attack against the use of anonymous sources in news reports published by the Chinese media.The charges leveled against the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend...
Features
05.27.14
China’s Experiment with Deliberative Democracy
Chinese pro-democracy protests begun in the late spring of 1989 led to the brutal military suppression on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 25 years ago this June 4. Around the world, discussions of the events of that spring have been well underway for...
Media
05.23.14
“What’s Been Done to My Beautiful Homeland?”
Nigel Maiti, an ethnically Uighur host for Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, is a well-known and popular entertainer with more than 1 million followers on the social media site Sina Weibo. After 31 were killed by a coordinated bomb and truck attack at...
Environment
05.23.14
Killing Pika Won’t Save Tibetan Grasslands
from chinadialogue
A pest extermination campaign is under way on western China’s Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. But experts say there is no scientific basis for the killing of the pika, a small rabbit-like mammal, and warn that the campaign may throw the ecosystem further...
Environment
05.21.14
Infographic: China’s Pig Footprint
from chinadialogue
Meat invariably means pig in China, with pork accounting for 65% of the meat consumed in the country.And after last year's high-profile takeover of the U.S. pig giant Smithfield by Shuanghui International, since renamed the WH Group, the...
Media
05.20.14
Netizens Complain Chinese Government Was Slow to Respond to Violence in Vietnam
On May 18, Hong Lei, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said China “will suspend some of its plans for bilateral exchanges with Vietnam in response to the deadly violence against Chinese nationals in the country,” according to...
Media
05.19.14
One Uighur Man’s Journey in Two Cultures
Over the past two months, the relationship between China’s estimated 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people, most of whom follow some form of Sunni Islam, and the majority Han population has deteriorated after a series of violent incidents...
Caixin Media
05.19.14
“White Glove” Sisters at Center of Coal Country Graft Scandal
Two sisters with business savvy and important friends in high places are now the standout figures in the mysterious case of a former Shanxi province government official, Jin Daoming, charged with corruption.Few details of the Jin case have emerged...
Viewpoint
05.16.14
Government Steps Up To Labor’s Demands
On April 14, most of the 40,000 workers at the Dongguan Yue Yuen shoe factory—supplier to Nike, Adidas, and other international brands—began what would become a two-week work stoppage. While there are thousands of strikes in China every year, the...
Environment
05.15.14
Anti-Chinese Sentiment on Rise in Myanmar
from chinadialogue
The Shwe pipeline shaves an angry bald strip across the red clay hills and disappears into the morning mist. A sign hanging above an area cordoned off by bamboo fencing warns in English, “Severe punishment on pipeline destruction.”“Families were...
Media
05.15.14
Evan Osnos: China’s ‘Age of Ambition’
New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos discusses his new book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, with Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations.{chop}
Media
05.13.14
Why Are There No Credit Scores in China?
Few would dispute that Chinese society suffers from a serious trust problem. After surviving crafty scams and shoddy products for years, Chinese people have become guarded with strangers and cautious in business dealings. Given all that, it would be...
Caixin Media
05.13.14
China Comes to Grips with Poisons Underfoot
Pollution that is easily perceptible in China's rivers and urban air has gotten a lot of attention in recent years.Now a less obvious environmental concern with equally serious repercussions—soil contamination—is getting the attention it...
Media
05.08.14
The Chinese Are Coming! (And That’s OK)
On April 29, the United States Chamber of Commerce, a U.S. lobbying group, announced that Chinese investment in the United States surpassed U.S. investment in China for the first time. The news has been a long time in coming: Over the past decade,...
Environment
05.07.14
Why China Will Fight for a Global Climate Deal Next Year
from chinadialogue
China is now the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and so the world will pay close attention to its stance at next year’s climate negotiations in Paris, as well as to the kinds of actions it takes to tackle climate change post-2020...
Caixin Media
05.06.14
Growing Pains for a Megalopolis in Transition
Twenty years of on-and-off government discussions have yielded little progress toward the goal of coordinating urban and industrial development in a key Chinese megalopolis—the region encompassing the nation's capital Beijing, neighboring Hebei...
Media
05.06.14
Chinese to the World: Ignore Our GDP
The U.S.-based World Bank grabbed everybody’s attention by announcing that China was poised to displace the United States as the world’s largest economy based on purchasing power. But a survey of the Chinese web shows people at home aren’t buying it...
Environment
04.30.14
China’s Environmental Law Good on Paper
from chinadialogue
China’s environmental protection law, which stirred great controversy during its amendment process, has finally been passed. The updated law makes significant progress in the area of public interest litigation and strengthens the legislative tools...
Media
04.30.14
Five Lessons From the Axing of ‘The Big Bang Theory’
It’s a plot twist few saw coming. Not long ago, China’s video streaming sites were trying to clean up years of copyright violations by paying big bucks to license popular U.S. television shows. For their part, Chinese fans had begun to abandon the...
Caixin Media
04.29.14
‘Black Jail’ Victims Hunt Down Captors, Get Day in Court
A recent one-day trial in the northern province of Hebei involving China’s “black jail” industry came about because people who say they were illegally detained did some detective work to find their former prison and then took the matter to the media...
Media
04.28.14
A Guide to Social Class in Modern China
Class is a sensitive word in China. Marxist-Leninist rhetoric like “class enemies,” “class conflict,” and “class struggle” are rarely seen in the country’s media these days, but since China began its market reforms in 1979, stratification has...
Media
04.25.14
Bieliebers They Are Not—Chinese Outraged by Singer’s Tokyo Shrine Visit
Justin Bieber has once again displayed his talent for seemingly effortless international gaffes. The twenty-year-old Canadian pop princeling, who last year wrote “hopefully she would have been a Belieber” in the guestbook on his visit to the Anne...
Environment
04.24.14
Almost One-Fifth of China’s Arable Land is Polluted
from chinadialogue
Almost one-fifth of China’s arable land is polluted to various degrees, according to a national soil quality report on April 17.The report, based on seven-years’ worth of tests on 6.3 million square kilometers (2.4 million square miles) of land,...
Caixin Media
04.23.14
Graft Inquiry at CNPC Uncovers Shady Deal
A little-known deal related to an equally little-known, yet highly productive oilfield has come to light as a graft investigation unfolds at oil giant China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC). A businessman with strong ties to officials is behind the...
Viewpoint
04.23.14
From Half the Sky to ‘Leftovers’
The three-plus decades since the inception of the ‘one child’ policy have resulted in a huge female shortage in China. The country is now seriously unbalanced, with 18 million more boys than girls. By 2020, there will be some 30 million surplus men...
Media
04.23.14
Welcome to Uighur Web—Now Watch What You Say
China’s Internet is vast, with millions of sites and more than 618 million users. But nested within that universe is a tiny virtual community comprising just a few thousand websites where China’s Uighur, the country’s fifth-largest ethnic minority...
Viewpoint
04.20.14
The Specter of June Fourth
If yesterday was typical, about 1,400 children in Africa died of malaria. It is a preventable, treatable disease, and the young victims lost their lives through no faults of their own. Why it is that human beings accept a fact like this as an...
Media
04.17.14
Ai Weiwei’s Reach Draws New Yorkers’ Attention to Free Speech
“Ai Weiwei retweeted me!” exclaimed a young blonde woman, laughing and waving her iPhone in the air with excitement. She and some two hundred other New Yorkers had gathered on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza to show her...
Environment
04.16.14
Ten Steps to Cleaner Air in China’s Cities
from chinadialogue
Earlier this year, former San Francisco planning advisor Eugene Leong looked at the legacy of air pollution in San Francisco. Here he draws out ten key policy lessons for China's leadership.Recognize PM2.5 pollution as a complex problem that...
Caixin Media
04.15.14New Sichuan Petchem Plant on Shaky Ground
A controversial petrochemical project in the southwestern province of Sichuan quietly went into operation in March, but questions about the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) facility continue to linger.The project is in Pengzhou, a city of 763,...
Media
04.15.14
Captain America Conquers China
SHANGHAI—This week, while U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s trip to China was underscoring bilateral tensions between the two powers, the Chinese masses were busy embracing another U.S. visitor. The Marvel superhero sequel Captain America: The...
Media
04.11.14
Is Jesus Really Hotter Than Mao on China’s Social Media?
It’s easier to talk about Jesus than Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping on Weibo, China’s massive Twitter-like social media platform.The atheist Chinese Communist Party, known for its sometimes heavy-handed policies...