Conversation
08.06.24How Safe Is China’s Food in Light of the Fuel-Tanker Cooking-Oil Scandal?
Melamine-tainted milk, rat meat sold as lamb, recycled cooking oil sourced from restaurant waste or even sewers, rice containing poisonous heavy metals: food safety scandals were extraordinarily frequent in China in the first 15 years of the 21st...
Viewpoint
12.12.23No One Is Talking About the Plight of Uyghurs with Disabilities in Detention. The World Owes Them More.
In 2016, Chinese authorities began rounding up Uyghur intellectuals. Among those detained was Ababekri Muhtar, the founder of Misranim, a popular social media site used by Uyghurs to debate with and learn from each other. Muhtar relies on a...
Viewpoint
11.01.22In Tibet, Officials’ Pursuit of Zero-COVID Sent Tens of Thousands into Mass ‘Isolation’ Facilities
The general attitude in Lhasa since early September has been marked by concern and discontent. Its focus has been primarily on the mass transfer by city officials of thousands of citizens to isolation camps, and on the ways in which officials have...
Conversation
04.29.22Shanghai’s Lockdown
In late March, China started its largest lockdown in more than two years, with most of Shanghai’s 26 million residents confined to their homes in an effort to battle the rapid spread of Omicron. As of mid-April, 45 cities across the country were...
Viewpoint
04.08.22Closing the U.S. to Chinese Biotech Would Do Far More Harm Than Good
Biotechnology intrinsically blurs boundaries between science and commerce, market and state, the global and the national, and even personal privacy and collective interest. Progress depends more heavily in biotech than in other high-tech industries...
Conversation
02.12.21Will China Be a Global Vaccine Leader?
Beijing stands to reap major rewards by becoming the supplier of choice—or necessity—throughout low- and middle-income countries. China has expanded its international aid efforts in recent years and stressed its commitment to “south-south”...
Viewpoint
01.22.21In Xinjiang, Rare Protests Came Amid Lockdown
Six months after China rolled out its first coronavirus lockdown in Wuhan in late January 2020, Urumqi was placed under quarantine. The first lockdown specifically targeting the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, rather than the...
The NYRB China Archive
10.08.20How Did China Beat Its COVID Crisis?
from New York Review of Books
The coronavirus was a big deal; it was something that I (and many other smug foreigners) misjudged but that the Chinese authorities accurately saw as a public health crisis. The thought and effort that went into the flyer were especially impressive...
Viewpoint
07.30.20For Wuhan’s COVID Mourners, Little Has Been Laid to Rest
In a conversation on Weibo, Yang, 50, told me about the loss of her 24-year-old daughter, Yuxi, her only child, to COVID-19. She was grieving, of course, but she was also seeking justice for what she viewed as an avoidable death. She showed me a...
Viewpoint
07.27.20Pandemic Responses Suffer from Common Ailments
As the world continues to reel from the COVID-19 pandemic, the onslaught of new developments, disrupted routines, and fast-evolving medical research and advice trap us in a kind of eternal present. Each day feels unprecedented. But, at least since...
Viewpoint
05.21.20A New U.S. ‘Consensus’ on China May Not Be as Solid as It Appears
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought ties between Washington and Beijing to their lowest level since the countries normalized relations in 1979, with many observers warning that they have entered into either “a new Cold War” or at least “a new type of...
Viewpoint
05.21.20How Will Historians Look Back at the Coronavirus Outbreak?
Imagine that a historian decides to reflect on the pandemic, asking quite simply, “How did it come to this?” There would be many ways of telling that story. But one way would be to chart a series of off-ramps on the road to disaster. Some of these...
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...
China in the World Podcast
05.14.20Missing in Action: U.S.-China Cooperation on Coronavirus
from Carnegie China
The coronavirus outbreak has highlighted the many issues in the U.S.-China relationship. Why can’t Washington and Beijing better coordinate a response to the pandemic, replicating their cooperative efforts during the 2008 financial crisis and 2014...
Conversation
04.26.20How Is the Coronavirus Outbreak Affecting China’s Relations with Its Asian Neighbors?
How has China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic—inside and outside of China—affected perceptions of China among countries in Asia? And how might this shape future policy toward China, or the regional policy landscape more broadly?
Conversation
04.06.20What Does the Coronavirus Mean for EU-China Relations?
2020 promised to be an especially consequential year for the EU-China relationship, but three highly anticipated summits have been thrown into uncertainty, and diplomacy between Europe and China is now completely consumed by the coronavirus crisis.
Viewpoint
04.03.20‘We’re Hardly Heroic’
Dr. Li, a heart specialist at Wuhan No. 4 Hospital, spent the third week of March preparing for the reopening of the hospital’s general clinics, which closed on January 22, when No. 4 became a key facility for treating COVID-19 patients. After...
Conversation
03.28.20Is U.S.-China Cooperation on COVID-19 Still Possible?
Over the past two weeks, as the outbreak of the virus known has COVID-19 has accelerated its deadly spread around the world, an already collapsing U.S.-China relationship appears to be entering a period of free fall. This is happening at a moment...
Conversation
03.19.20As Its Coronavirus Outbreak Abates, China Is Trying out a New Look. Is It Working?
As the coronavirus spreads globally, China’s government is working aggressively to change its international image. In the span of just a few weeks, China has gone from the embattled epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic to presenting the country as...
03.05.20
China Alters Civil Society Rules, Allowing More Groups to Respond to Coronavirus
As the COVID-19 epidemic continues in China, so do the efforts of civil society organizations and concerned citizens to mitigate the harm. In the official approach to managing their involvement, there have been clumsy force-of-habit measures from...
The NYRB China Archive
03.02.20Evacuation from China, Quarantine in the UK: A COVID-19 Dispatch
from New York Review of Books
I had missed the first British evacuation when my embassy didn’t get me a permit for the checkpoints in time, but I was trying to make the second. My send-off gifts: two instant-noodle pots (hot food safer than cold), a tub of alcohol-soaked cotton...
Viewpoint
02.22.20Despite Government Assurances, Medical Workers in Hubei Say They Lack Supplies
Amid quickly changing news about the trajectory of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, Covid-19, on February 20, the Chinese government body overseeing the response to the epidemic announced that medical supplies adequate to combating the spread...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.06.20The NYRB China Archive
02.04.20Stuck in Central China on Coronavirus Lockdown
from New York Review of Books
Before Shiyan, a city in Hubei province, went into quarantine, the sum of 30 yuan (about $4) could buy two cabbages, enough spring onions for two soups, a large white radish, two lettuces, a potato, and 10 eggs. Not any more. Wanting to record the...
Viewpoint
01.29.20How Much Could a New Virus Damage Beijing’s Legitimacy?
A month into the coronavirus epidemic that has swept across China, the details of the Chinese government’s political and administrative response remain highly ambiguous. What has been unmistakable, however, is the volume and intensity of social...
Viewpoint
11.30.18Cut out of the Operating Room
In June 2015, doctors told 69-year-old Shuai Shuiqing she had stomach cancer and would need surgery. She left her home in the city of Chongzhou in Sichuan province and traveled 20 miles to visit Chengdu’s Huaxi Hospital, which is ranked second best...
The China Africa Project
09.10.18Should African Governments Welcome Or Be Wary of Chinese Infrastructure Investment?
China announced a U.S.$60 billion financing package for African states to build out new roads, airports, railways, and other needed infrastructure. While no one questions the need for infrastructure, there are legitimate concerns as to whether it...
Books
08.08.18Poisonous Pandas
Stanford University Press: A favorite icon for cigarette manufacturers across China since the mid-20th century has been the panda, with factories from Shanghai to Sichuan using cuddly cliché to market tobacco products. The proliferation of panda-branded cigarettes coincides with profound, yet poorly appreciated, shifts in the worldwide tobacco trade. Over the last 50 years, transnational tobacco companies and their allies have fueled a tripling of the world’s annual consumption of cigarettes. At the forefront is the China National Tobacco Corporation, now producing 40 percent of cigarettes sold globally. What’s enabled the manufacturing of cigarettes in China to flourish since the time of Mao and to prosper even amidst public health condemnation of smoking?In Poisonous Pandas, an interdisciplinary group of scholars comes together to tell that story. They offer novel portraits of people within the Chinese polity―government leaders, scientists, tax officials, artists, museum curators, and soldiers―who have experimentally revamped the country’s pre-Communist cigarette supply chain and fitfully expanded its political, economic, and cultural influence. These portraits cut against the grain of what contemporary tobacco-control experts typically study, opening a vital new window on tobacco―the single largest cause of preventable death worldwide today.{chop}Related Reading:“In China, Industry Push-Back Stubs out Anti-Smoking Gains,” Christian Shepherd, Reuters, May 31, 2018“China’s Ministry in Charge of Tobacco Control Had Ties to the Tobacco Industry. Not Anymore,” Sidney Leng, South China Morning Post, March 15, 2018“The End of China’s ‘Ashtray Diplomacy’,” Heather Timmons and Quartz, The Atlantic, December 30, 2013“The Political Mapping of China’s Tobacco Industry and Anti-Smoking Campaign,” Cheng Li, Brookings, May 30, 2012Author’s Recommendations:Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon (Harvard University Press, 2013)Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler (Verso; Reprint edition 2010)Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben, Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998)
ChinaFile Recommends
07.03.18As ‘Health Attacks’ Persist, U.S. Pulls More Americans Out of China
Wall Street Journal
The U.S. has evacuated at least three Americans from Beijing after they reported unusual health symptoms, in the latest evacuations since unexplained health incidents first affected U.S. diplomatic personnel stationed in Cuba in 2016.
Video
05.07.18Ou 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...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.03.18Another Problem with China’s Coal: Mercury in Rice
The Conversation
Mercury enters rice through local industrial activities and through burning coal.
ChinaFile Recommends
02.15.18China Confirms First Ever Human Case of H7N4 Bird Flu
Guardian
A 68-year-old patient from Jiangsu province, who has since recovered, developed symptoms on Christmas Day and was admitted to hospital
ChinaFile Recommends
02.14.18Flu Fears Spread in China Ahead of Lunar New Year Holiday
Wall Street Journal
Chinese health authorities said the worst influenza season in recent years was straining the country’s resources and some experts warned that the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese go on the road, could make things worse.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.24.17China Lifts Ban on Stinky Cheese
New York Post
Authorities imposed the embargo in September because the stinky cheeses were made with strains of bacteria banned in China.
ChinaFile Recommends
10.18.17The Human Cost of China’s Economic Reforms
BBC
Mr Yu is worried that millions of workers the Chinese government plans to lay off from failing state owned companies will be “abandoned” like he says he was 15 years ago.
ChinaFile Recommends
09.06.17Pregnant Chinese Woman ‘Commits Suicide’ after Family Refuse to Allow Her to Have a Caesarean Section
South China Morning Post
A heavily pregnant woman is reported to have committed suicide after her family repeatedly refused to let her have a caesarean section.
Viewpoint
08.28.17China Is Risking the Lives of Political Prisoners by Denying Them Medical Care
Dissident activist Chen Xi entered Xingyi Prison in Guangxi in January 2012 to serve a 10-year sentence. The previous month, he had been convicted of “inciting subversion of state power” for writing articles about human rights and democracy. This...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.31.17Chinese Blogger Sorry after Essay Slamming Beijingers’ ‘Fake’ Lives Goes Viral and Is Censored
South China Morning Post
Widely-read blog criticized by state media after it lists complaints about soaring property prices, crowded subways and lack of human warmth in the capital
ChinaFile Recommends
02.14.17India’s Air Pollution Rivals China’s as World’s Deadliest
New York Times
India’s rapidly worsening air pollution is causing about 1.1 million people to die prematurely each year and is now surpassing China’s as the deadliest in the world, a new study of global air pollution shows.
Depth of Field
01.17.17House 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...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.23.16China Reports First Two Human Deaths from Bird Flu This Winter
Reuters
Two people in China's Anhui province have died from H7N9 bird flu, the first fatalities in China among this winter's cases
ChinaFile Recommends
12.22.16Students in China Were Made to Take Exams Outdoors in Toxic Smog
Time
Widely circulated photos of the students, sitting at desks while blanketed in choking pollution, starkly dramatize the Chinese "airpocalypse"
ChinaFile Recommends
12.21.16Smog Refugees Flee Chinese Cities as ‘Airpocalypse’ Blights Half a Billion
Guardian
Thousands head to pollution-free regions as haze descends on the country’s northern industrial heartland
Features
12.15.16‘Caught in Quicksand’: Gay and HIV-Positive in China
China is a country with giant cities, huge skyscrapers, and the world’s second largest economy. But underneath its modern looking facade, the country is still very traditional; this is especially true of attitudes toward homosexuality.China’s...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.03.16The 80-Year-Old Runway Model Reshaping China’s Views on Aging
New York Times
Last year, at 79, Mr. Wang walked the runway for the first time, his physique at his age causing a national sensation
ChinaFile Recommends
10.11.16Risk of Vanishing: More than 1,300 Elderly Go Missing in China Every Day
China Daily
Online app helps find 100 lost seniors as research shows growing dementia threat
ChinaFile Recommends
09.28.16China Grapples With HIV Cases Among Gay Men, but Stigma Runs Deep
Wall Street Journal
Surge in infections worries health authorities and prompts soul-searching in a conservative society
ChinaFile Recommends
09.27.16China Tops WHO List for Deadly Outdoor Air Pollution
Guardian
More than 1 million people died from dirty air in one year
Media
09.23.16In China, Organic Food Is Gaining Ground
Wan Li, a young Beijing professional in her late 20s, is at her desk when her cell phone rings. She picks up. “North entrance?” She confirms. “I’ll be right out.” An electric delivery scooter has just pulled up to Wan’s office with her order of...
ChinaFile Recommends
09.23.16China Will Resume Imports of U.S. Beef After a Ban Long Seen as Political
Time
For an American industry that relies increasingly on global demand, the news is welcome
ChinaFile Recommends
09.20.16Gay Pride: China Activists Fight ‘Conversion Therapy’
Hong Kong Free Press
Coming out was never going to be easy, but Yu never thought it would see him committed
Caixin Media
07.19.16Killer Knotweed Exposes Dangers of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Amid rising public concerns about side-effects of traditional Chinese medicines, or TCM, following the death of a young woman who died of liver failure last year, a government-backed medical association has started compiling a database of substances...
Environment
07.19.16Schoolkids Suffer Toxic Air at Recycled Rubber Athletic Tracks
Chinese are known for recycling, and recycling everything. The industry is even responsible for making billionaires, like China’s “wastepaper queen” Zhang Yin.Yet when factories recycle irresponsibly, the consequences can be dire. Reports...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.19.16China and India Burdened by Untreated Mental Disorders
New York Times
Less than 10 percent of people in India and China with a mental disorder received effective treatment.
Green Space
05.04.16Vaccine Scandal Rocks China
China was rocked last month by another public health scandal, after Chinese police announced the discovery of a criminal organization selling millions of improperly stored vaccines in 24 provinces and municipalities. The affected vaccines have a...
Media
05.03.16Scandal Highlights China’s Weak Environmental Enforcement
from chinadialogue
For many Chinese, the country’s soil pollution crisis has become increasingly acute in recent weeks after several hundred children fell ill from attending a school built close to a former fertilizer factory.Almost 500 students at the Changzhou...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.01.15Putting China’s Coal Consumption Into Context
Brookings Institution
Few issues are more likely to provoke interest about China.
Photo Gallery
12.01.15Life After Death
A family mourns the loss of a husband and father, who died after a decade-long fight against silicosis contracted while working in China’s gold mines. He was one of an estimated 6 million workers in China who have some form of pneumoconiosis, the...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.17.15China Bends Vow, Using Prisoners’ Organs for Transplants
New York Times
A senior Chinese health official said last year that China would stop using prisoners’ organs for transplants as of Jan. 1, 2015.