Viewpoint
02.04.14
In Slickness and in Wealth
Under the harsh glare of a studio spotlight, bride-to-be Tong turns her face until it is almost completely in shadow. Tong is posing for a three-day session of wedding photographs at Shanghai’s premier Princess Studio, where couples spend between 3,...
Media
02.03.14
‘Chicken Fart Decade’: GDP Vs. Smog
Chinese media have debated why January saw pollution so extreme it closed schools and airports, chased away foreign tourists, and even prompted a ban on Lunar New Year’s fireworks. It’s likely that a substantial portion of this smog is caused by...
Environment
01.31.14
Beijing Passes Law to Curb Air Pollution
from chinadialogue
China’s first legally binding regulations for reducing PM2.5 levels have been approved by Beijing’s municipal congress.Beijing’s annual average PM2.5 level currently stands at 89.5 micrograms per cubic meter, far exceeding the 35-micrograms national...
Media
01.31.14
Closing Time? China’s Social Media Crackdown Has Hit Weibo Hard
Findings by East China Normal University (ECNU), a research university in Shanghai, commissioned by respected U.K. outlet The Telegraph and released January 30, lodges concrete data behind what frequent users and analysts of Chinese social media...
Environment
01.30.14
This Chinese Filmmaker Can’t Stop Talking Trash
Documentary filmmaker and photographer Wang Jiuliang spent four years, between 2008 and 2011, documenting over 460 hazardous and mostly illegal landfill sites around Beijing.His award-winning film Beijing Besieged by Waste (2011) provoked intense...
Environment
01.29.14
Banned Toxins Found in Kids’ Clothes Made in China
from chinadialogue
Toxic chemicals have been found in children’s clothes sold by Burberry, Adidas, Disney, and nine other brands, according to a report published by the campaign group Greenpeace. These chemicals can be ingested via hand-to-mouth contact, and then...
Media
01.28.14
Why China’s Li Na Won’t Thank Her Homeland
After winning the Australian Open on January 25, Li Na set off a media blitz in her native China, where the thirty-one-year-old tennis star made the front page of most major papers. Much discussion surrounded Li’s post-victory speech, where she once...
Caixin Media
01.27.14
Time for Overhaul of China’s Land Market
The expected launch of land reform is dividing opinions. At a work meeting this month, the Minister of Land and Resources, Jiang Daming, said the central government would limit land supply in cities with more than five million residents. His words...
Features
01.26.14
For Freedom, Justice, and Love
from China Change
Following is legal activist Xu Zhiyong’s closing statement at the end of his trial in Beijing on January 22, 2014. According to his lawyer, Xu was only able to read “about ten minutes of it before the presiding judge stopped him, saying it was...
Media
01.23.14
Carpe Coin: Crowdfunding Could Change Chinese Politics
Crowdfunding, which allows web users to contribute small sums of money to fund collective projects like concerts and films, is taking off in China—and just how far it will go is more than a business question. By allowing netizens to vote with their...
Media
01.23.14
Out of the Dark Room
Photographers document China’s breakneck development in fractions of a second every single day. Yet the work of Chinese photojournalists remains largely unseen outside their homeland. Of the thousands of images of the country illustrating the pages...
Caixin Media
01.21.14
How a PLA General Built a Web of Corruption to Amass a Fortune
More than twenty policemen lined up at the gate of a massive mansion in a village in the central province of Henan at midnight on January 12, 2013, loading heavy crates onto two military trucks.Hours later—loaded with twenty crates of expensive...
Environment
01.21.14
Real-time Air Quality Data Due from 179 Chinese Cities
from chinadialogue
More than 170 cities in China have now joined a real-time air quality disclosure scheme, initiated by the Ministry of Environmental Protection.Launched in 2012, more than sixty cities had started publishing data from their monitoring stations by the...
Media
01.17.14
You’ve Got Mail: Chinese Communist Party Received Almost Two Million Complaints in 2013
In 2013, China’s Communist Party disciplinary organs received an eye-popping 1.95 million citizen complaints about officials. This is a 49.2 percent jump from 2012, according to a January 13 report from state-run website China News Online—but...
Environment
01.15.14
Why Low-Carbon Innovation Matters
from chinadialogue
It came as little surprise when Beijing’s environmental authorities reported in early January last year that the capital’s levels of PM2.5 (a measure of air pollution) were more than double the national standard. The past year saw no end to the smog...
Viewpoint
01.14.14
Xi, Mao, and China’s Search for a Usable Past
Since its founding, the United States has had understandable pride in its great achievements, but also has had to reckon with its complex moral history—beginning but hardly ending with the fact that our original Constitution accepted the evil of...
Caixin Media
01.13.14
Leading the Battle for Reform
The turn of the year brought news that President Xi Jinping will take the helm of the new leading group for overall reform.This group is a key part of China’s reform drive. As soon as its formation was announced at the Third Plenum of the Communist...
Media
01.10.14
Shaq in China: A Love Story
At seven-foot-one, roughly 350 pounds, and with a smile that’s been featured on everything from cereal boxes to CD album covers, Shaquille O’Neal isn’t particularly hard to recognize. And yet there I stood at the airport arrival gate in Chongqing, a...
Environment
01.08.14
The Drying Up of China’s Largest Freshwater Lake
from chinadialogue
When Jiang Minsheng moored his fishing boat on the eastern shore of Jiangxi’s Poyang Lake in November last year, he didn’t expect to it to be marooned. The fisherman’s village is on an island in the middle of the freshwater lake, once China’s...
Caixin Media
01.08.14
How Shanghai’s Free Trade Zone Works
At a conference table surrounded by bookshelves in his Shanghai office, the city’s party boss Han Zheng recently polished the image of a commercial crown jewel—the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone—during an exclusive interview with Caixin.Han...
Media
01.07.14
Grand Theft China: Tase Corrupt Officials in New Online Game
Official corruption in China is a serious matter: In January 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping openly vowed to tackle it, and a 2013 Pew study found that fifty-three percent of Chinese consider it a “very big problem.” But fighting bribery,...
Caixin Media
01.07.14
Chinese Firm Linked to CNPC Suspected of Fraud in Iraq
Just after the December 29 celebration of the Muslim holiday Ashura in southern Iraq, heads of the Iraqi subsidiary of China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) received a letter titled “Suspending all activities of Hermic.”The sender of the letter...
Media
01.03.14
Coming to Chinese Headlines in 2014
Chinese people have spent another year breathing dirty air, fretting about food safety, poking fun at corrupt officials, and complaining about tightening censorship—but as a discerning consumer of international news, you probably knew that already...
Media
01.03.14
2013, According to the Chinese Communist Party
What did the year in foreign policy look like in Chinese official circles? Divining the thoughts and motives of China’s leadership is a famously abstruse exercise even for Chinese citizens, who are often left to parse bland quotes or keep their ears...
Environment
01.03.14
Predictions for China’s Environment in 2014
from chinadialogue
From dead pigs in the Shanghai river to toxic smog in major cities, 2013 was a year of dramatic environmental stories in China. We asked some of our contributors for their predictions on how these and other stories are likely to develop in the...
Caixin Media
12.30.13The Rise and Fall of a Local Official Obsessed
A November 27 statement by the Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog confirmed that the Deputy Governor of Hubei Province, Guo Youming, was being investigated for graft.Three days later, Guo was removed from his post, becoming the thirteenth...
Environment
12.23.13
Project to Save South China Tigers in South Africa Lost in Wilderness
from chinadialogue
The Laohu Valley Reserve sits on a rolling plain about 200 kilometers from Bloemfontein, South Africa’s judicial capital. In September 2003, two South China tigers were sent to the reserve from a Chinese zoo. What began as an effort to save the...
Viewpoint
12.20.13‘Community Corrections’ and the Road Ahead for Re-Education Through Labor
Chinese and foreign observers welcomed the recent announcement that the Chinese government will “abolish”—not merely reform—the administrative punishment system known as re-education through labor (RTL). The proclamation, part of a sixty-point...
Culture
12.19.13Chinese Literature Online
In July of last year, Brixton, U.K.-based novelist Zelda Rhiando won the inaugural Kidwell-e Ebook Award. The award was billed as “the world’s first international e-book award.” It may have been the first time that e-writers in English from all over...
Media
12.19.13
Chinese Admiral to U.S. Navy: ‘We Will Block You’
On December 5, the U.S. missile-carrying cruiser Cowpens almost collided with a Chinese ship in international waters. The Cowpens was observing the maiden voyage of China’s new aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, when a vessel accompanying it cut across...
Environment
12.18.13
Fines Won’t Solve China’s Smog Problem
from chinadialogue
Eight municipal governments in northeast Liaoning province have together received 54.2 million yuan (U.S.$8.9 million) in fines for failing to reach air quality standards—the first time a provincial government has imposed financial penalties on...
Caixin Media
12.17.13
Are Changes to China’s Family-Planning Rules Too Little, Too Late?
Among the sixty areas covered in the Communist Party’s “decision” document released after the third plenum of the Eighteenth Central Committee, the most popular among ordinary people is a revision to the family planning policy to allow some couples...
Environment
12.12.13
China’s Coal Industry at a Crossroads
from chinadialogue
Times are getting rough for Wang Guangchun, a ten-year veteran sales manager of a state-owned coal company.“During the golden era of the past, clients came to find me,” Wang said. “Starting last year, we had to go looking for them.”Wang is employed...
Media
12.11.13
Pollution Has ‘Five Surprising Benefits,’ says State TV, but Chinese Unamused
Polluted air is a fact of life for many Chinese citizens, and it’s currently smothering parts of the country—but that’s not all bad, according to one state media outlet’s widely-ridiculed attempt at positive spin. A recent bout of noxious smog has...
Caixin Media
12.09.13
Traditional Chinese Medicine Struggling to Find Cure for Regulatory Woes in the U.S.
In November, the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) Fuzheng Huayu Tablets passed the second phase of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) clinical testing.Before this, only one TCM drug had cleared the second of the three phases needed for...
Media
12.06.13
China’s Viral, Nationalist Screed Against Western Encroachment
“You are nothing without your motherland.” It’s a trite phrase, one that seems unlikely to stir the blood of even the most dyed-in-the-wool nationalist—but it has found recent currency in China. An essay with that title has been making the rounds on...
Environment
12.05.13
Daoism, Confucianism, and the Environment
from chinadialogue
In September, an unusual environmental organization was launched in one of the most ancient and significant sites in China—the Songyang Academy, Dengfeng, Henan. Founded in the eleventh century AD, this was one of the four Confucian Academies of...
Media
12.04.13
Chinese Chortle at U.S. Request to Scrap Controversial Air Defense Zone
The United States wants China to pull back from its gambit to try to rewrite the East China Sea’s status quo, but the Chinese are having none of it. On December 2, the U.S. State Department said China’s newly-declared air defense identification zone...
Caixin Media
12.02.13
How an Expectant Mother Died in Qingdao
One of the fifty-five people to die in an explosion on November 22 at a pipeline owned by China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec) in the eastern city of Qingdao was a twenty-three-year-old pregnant woman named Chen Na.Her husband, who...
Environment
11.27.13Life in the Shadow of the Mekong Dams
from chinadialogue
This is the second in a two-part special report on the resettlement rights of villagers displaced by dams along the Mekong (Lancang) River. Part one is an analysis of how China’s resettlement policies are playing out on the ground. Part two, below,...
Media
11.27.13
China’s Favorite Villainess
Many U.S. viewers identify with serial killer Morgan Dexter of Dexter, inveterate womanizer Don Draper of Mad Men, or family man turned meth kingpin Walter White of Breaking Bad—however morally bankrupt they may be. Now, China has its own anti-hero...
Media
11.25.13
Former Committee to Protect Journalists Honoree Says Bloomberg Chief Should Not Chair Press Freedom Dinner
A prominent Hong Kong-based journalist has called on Daniel Doctoroff, Chief Executive Officer of Bloomberg L.P., to step down from his role as chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) annual International Press Freedom Awards dinner...
Media
11.25.13
Chinese Netizens Applaud Beijing’s Aggressive New Defense Zone
Beijing has just thrown down the latest gauntlet in a long-simmering territorial dispute with Tokyo—and China’s citizens are cheering. On November 23, China’s Ministry of Defense released a map showing the “Chinese Air Defense Identification Zone,”...
Caixin Media
11.25.13
Chinese State Oil Scandal Has Links to Iraq
A legal storm that started with China’s largest state-owned oil company has expanded to include Iraq and led to the detention of more people.Mi Xiaodong, a former mid-level official at China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) was detained by...
Media
11.22.13
Farewell, Everyman: Chinese React to Ambassador Locke’s Departure
Chinese are waving goodbye to the frustratingly normal U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, Gary Locke, who announced on November 20 that he will be leaving his post in early 2014. Over 300,000 netizens discussed Locke’s resignation on Sina Weibo, the...
Culture
11.22.13
A Homecoming
Shot in big cities and small towns across China in recent years, Shen Wei’s photographic project “Chinese Sentiment” is a personal journey to recapture bygone Chinese life in both private and public space. Born and raised in Shanghai, Shen Wei...
Media
11.21.13
For Cash-Strapped Parents, Two Babies Are Too Many
Call it reproduction with Chinese capitalist characteristics. On November 15, authorities announced that the country’s One-Child Policy would be loosened, adding couples in which one spouse is an only child to the list of families allowed to have...
Environment
11.21.13
Displaced by the Mekong Dams
from chinadialogue
This is the first in a two-part special report on the resettlement rights of villagers displaced by dams along the Mekong River.From far away, Kang Lianghong and his wife look like little white dots, zig-zagging their way down the steep hillside...
Culture
11.19.13
Why You Should Read Pearl Buck’s ‘New’ Novel
When I first heard that The Eternal Wonder, a new novel by Pearl Buck, was scheduled for publication by Open Road Media on October 22 of this year, I assumed the announcement was either a mistake or a joke.Buck, of course, is the author of The Good...
Viewpoint
11.18.13
Xi Jinping Refills an Old Prescription
The reforms called for by the Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party Congress have been, like so much else in China over the past few decades, part of an ongoing Chinese quest for national unity, wealth, and power. But, for those of us steeped in...
Caixin Media
11.18.13
What Do Investigative Reporters Do?
With the recent Chen Yongzhou scandal, many have called for an “investigation” into the investigative reporting business.I apply the term “investigative reporters” to those that often wade into the deeper, uncharted waters of the media’s realm. I...
Media
11.14.13
Westerners Aren’t the Only Ones Flummoxed by China’s Reform Plans
After the Third Plenum, a high-level meeting to discuss China’s future, ended on November 12, Beijing released a major document likely to affect many of its 1.3 billion citizens’ lives for years. Western media responded to the 5,000-plus character...
Environment
11.12.13
China’s Urban Dilemma
from chinadialogue
After nearly three decades of rapid urbanization, China’s official and unofficial city dwellers outnumber its farmers. More than 400 million people have already moved into cities in the past thirty years, and in 2011 China crossed the threshold of a...
Culture
11.11.13
All He Needs is a Miracle
Courtesy of the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History
A portrait of Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci by You Wenhui; painted at the time of Ricci’s death in Beijing, 1610. It now hangs at the Jesuit residence in Rome. It is the...
Caixin Media
11.11.13
How Ambition Buried an Official Known As ‘The Digger’
Cranes and bulldozers were quieter in the ancient city of Nanjing on October 16.News broke that day that the city’s fifty-seven-year-old mayor, Ji Jianye, was being investigated for “suspected serious discipline violations,” the Communist Party’s...
Features
11.08.13
Document 9: A ChinaFile Translation
This weekend, China’s leaders gather in Beijing for meetings widely expected to determine the shape of China’s economy, as well as the nation’s progress, over the next decade. What exactly the outcome of this Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party...
Viewpoint
11.08.13
China, One Year Later
In November 2012, seven men were appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s supreme governing body. At the time, economic headwinds, nationalist protests, and the Bo Xilai scandal presented huge challenges for the regime. Would the...
Media
11.07.13
After Party Headquarters Explosions, Netizens Debate Value of Violence
On the morning of November 6, an unknown assailant or group of assailants reportedly detonated several bombs outside the front door of the provincial government headquarters of Taiyuan, the capital of Northern China’s Shanxi province. China’s state-...
Viewpoint
11.07.13
Deciphering Xi Jinping’s Dream
On November 9, the Chinese Communist Party will host its Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee. This conference will be a key to deciphering the ruling philosophy of the new Chinese leadership, who will run the country for the...