Beijing, Vatican Prepare to Resume Talks for the First Time Since 2010

Kristine Kwok
South China Morning Post
Meeting said to be in the works, but recent anti-church actions could complicate dialogue.

Newton Student Penalized for Democracy Notes in China

Ellen Ishkanian
Boston Globe
High school senior Henry DeGroot was visiting a school outside Beijing on a semester abroad this year when he decided to make a point by writing prodemocracy messages in the notebook of a Chinese student.

Iowa Signs Historical Cooperation Agreement With China

Lynn Hicks
Des Moines Register
Iowa’s economic ties with China deepened Thursday as the state signed a cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Commerce of the world’s second-largest economy.

China Under-Reports Defence Spending, Says US

BBC
China has under-reported its 2014 defense spending by about 20%, according to an annual report put out by the US defense department.

China Admits to Failures Over Air Quality

Calum MacLeod
USA Today
Only three cities, or 4.1%, of the 74 major Chinese cities subject to air quality standards met the national standard for good air quality in 2013.

The Astrophysicist of Tiananmen

Alex Pasternack
Motherboard
Fang Lizhi, the prominent astrophysicist, was incredulous when, In January 1987, when Deng Xiaoping launched the slogan “modernization with Chinese characteristics.” 

Media

06.05.14

A 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...

China Escalates Its War on American Tech Firms

Michael Schuman
Time
The Chinese government, angered by Washington's charge that Beijing engages in cyberspying, is looking for some payback.

Exiled Tiananmen Leader Slips into China

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
Zhou Fengsuo, 47, a student leader in 1989, spent two days in the capital—visiting Tiananmen Square and a detention center where his friends are being held—before the authorities caught him on June 3.

Scientists Warn Against China’s Plan to Flatten Over 700 Mountains

Stuart Clark
Guardian
Environmental consequences of removing hills to create more land for cities not considered, academics say in Nature paper.

Never Before Seen Tiananmen Square Photos Found in Shoebox

China Girls
I was searching through my parents’ photos for a piece I was writing on Tiananmen Square and my father, when I stumbled across two rolls of negatives that appeared to be from the 1989 student democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Where the Flame Still Burns

J. C.
Economist
Hong Kong is the only place on Chinese soil where large public commemorations of the Tiananmen massacre take place; elsewhere memorials of the June 4th crackdown remain strictly forbidden.

After Tiananmen Square, New Lives On A New Continent

MICHEL MARTIN
NPR
After the democracy protests were crushed in 1989, many thought China would turn inward. Instead, a million Chinese citizens moved to Africa. Howard French discusses his book China's Second Continent.

The Tiananmen Square Massacre, According to WikiLeaks

Jeff South
Medium
Diplomatic cables chronicle China’s quashing of pro-democracy movement.

See What China Sees When It Searches For “Tiananmen” and Other Loaded Terms

Nikhil Sonnad
Quartz
Blocked on Weibo is one of the most interesting websites on the internet: A list that explains the search terms that are censored on China’s massive microblogging site Weibo.

25 Years Later, Tiananmen Square Still Colors U.S.-China Relations

Tom Malinowski
U.S. State Department
Today, the United States is asking of the Chinese government what we have asked for 25 years: to provide the fullest possible accounting of the Tiananmen events and to stop retribution against those who wish to remember them.

25 Years Later, Lessons From Tiananmen Square Crackdown

Melinda Liu
National Geographic
A quarter century after democracy protests ended in bloodshed, Chinese still clamor for clean government and courts.

Remarks by President Obama at at 25th Anniversary of Freedom Day

Barack Obama
Office of the Press Secretary
Barack Obama reminds Poles that while they voted for democracy twenty-five years ago this day, China crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

As China Booms, So Does Popular Unrest

Bruce Kennedy
CBS News
In the quarter-century since the crackdown in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, China's economy has thrived and presented the world with an historic milestone. But at what cost to its people?

In Pictures, Remembering the Tiananmen Square Massacre

Niki Walker
Mashable
Twenty-five years ago on Wednesday, the Chinese government, acting under martial law, deployed 200,000 troops into Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Tiananmen at Twenty-Five: "Victory Over Memory"

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
Today, technology and globalism are prying open the lives of China’s people. But, in matters of politics and history, the Party is determined to silence even the “few flies” that Deng Xiaoping once described as a bearable side effect of an open...

Hong Kong Recalls Tiananmen Killings, China Muffles Dissent

Adam Rose and Ben Blanchard
Reuters
Tens of thousands of people held a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong to mark the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protesters 25 years ago in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, while mainland China authorities sought to whitewash the event.

Marking 25th Anniversary of China's Tiananmen Square Takes Creativity

Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times
Every year, political activists try to commemorate those who died in the 1989 crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese government tries to prevent them, a cat-and-mouse game as classic as "Tom and Jerry."

Stuart Franklin: How I Photographed Tiananmen Square and 'Tank Man'

Mee-Lai Stone
Guardian
The Magnum photographer tells his story of the 1989 protests, from peaceful demonstration to bloody crackdown, the iconic 'tank man' – and how hamburgers gave him his big break.

Media

06.03.14

A Day to Remember/A Day Forgotten

Susan Jakes
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

Susan Shirk
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...

China Follows USA With Emissions Pledge

Kim Hjelmgaard
USA Today
One day after the United States said it would slash carbon emissions from existing power plants by 30% below 2005 levels, China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, said it would set an absolute cap on its emissions by 2016.

China Swaps Gusto for Rigor as It Learns From Africa

Franz Wild
Bloomberg
Cowed by capricious commodity prices, political instability and a string of lost investments, Chinese financiers aren’t as gutsy as when state-owned giants whipped up business abroad 15 years ago.

Tiananmen, Forgotten

Helen Gao
New York Times
To my generation, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades.

Culture

06.03.14

A Visit to Hong Kong’s June 4th Museum

Amy Chung
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...

The Tanks and the People

Liao Yiwu from New York Review of Books
Twenty-five years ago, before the Tiananmen massacre, my father told me: “Son, be good and stay at home, never provoke the Communist Party.”My father knew what he was talking about. His courage had been broken, by countless political campaigns...

Tales of Army Discord Show Tiananmen Square in a New Light

Andrew Jacobs and Chris Buckley
New York Times
In a stunning rebuke to his superiors, Major General Xu Qinxian said the Tiananmen protests were a political problem and should be settled through negotiations, not force.

China Escalating Attack on Google

Dan Levin
New York Times
The authorities in China have made Google’s services largely inaccessible in recent days, a move most likely related to the government’s broad efforts to stifle discussion of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

Malaysia Seeks Code of Conduct for South China Sea

Jason Ng
Wall Street Journal
Malaysia urged a rapid conclusion to creating a long-stalled code of conduct in the South China Sea, as tensions grow over conflicting territorial ambitions in Asian waters between Beijing and neighboring countries.

25 Years After the Tiananmen Crackdown

Zhang Hongtu and Zhao Gang
Creative Time Reports
The Asian American Arts Centre responded to the June 1989 events with an open-call exhibition of artworks related to the uprising and its suppression called “China: June 4, 1989.” To commemorate the event's 25th anniversary, Creative Time...

A Media Mogul, Alone on the Island

John Garnaut
Foreign Policy
Hong Kong's fiery beacon of the free press, Apple Daily, is under threat from shadowy forces. Can it survive if Beijing wants it dead or quiet?

Conversation

06.02.14

25 Years On, Can China Move Past Tiananmen?

Xu Zhiyuan, Arthur Waldron & more
Xu Zhiyuan:Whenever the massacre at Tiananmen Square twenty-five years ago comes up in conversation, I think of Faulkner’s famous line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”Some believe that China’s economic growth and rise to international...

Video

06.02.14

Cairo in Chinese

Alison Klayman
When Shen Yitong left her home in China to study French at Cairo University in 2008, she didn’t know that she would come to think of Egypt as a second home, or that she would see revolution come upon the country so suddenly. Her parents came from...

‘You Won’t Get Near Tiananmen!’: Hu Jia on the Continuing Crackdown

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Hu Jia is one of China’s best-known political activists. He participated in the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a fifteen-year-old, studied economics, and then worked for environmental and public health non-governmental organizations. A practicing...

Reports

06.01.14

Decoding China’s Emerging “Great Power” Strategy in Asia

Christopher K. Johnson, Ernest Z. Bower, Victor D. Cha, Michael J. Green, Matthew P. Goodman
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
The course charted by China’s reemergence as a great power over the next few decades represents the primary strategic challenge for the U.S.-Japan security alliance and for the East Asian security landscape writ large. If China’s economic, military...

American Businesses in China Feel Heat of a Cyberdispute

Edward Wong
New York Times
Chinese officials are ramping up political and economic pressure on the United States following indictments against five members of the Chinese Army on charges of economic cyberespionage.

25 Years On, No Fading of Tiananmen Wounds, Ideals

Louise Watt and Isolda Morillo
Associated Press
While China's economy, society and cities have transformed in the last 25 years, Tiananmen demonstrators and their supporters are keen to remind the world that other things haven't changed.

Abe’s Attempt to Corner China Through Diplomacy

Clint Richards
Diplomat
Japan is reaching out to Southeast Asia and seeking to control the discourse around its new security policy.

Obama Says the U.S. Will Lead the World for the Next 100 Years. China Disagrees.

Gu Jinglu
Washington Post
The Global Times, China’s state-run nationalist-leaning newspaper, later challenged that view, asking, “America wants to lead the world for another 100 years, but with what?”

China Scrambles to Adjust to Baby Boomlet

Laurie Burkitt
Wall Street Journal
China's health officials are taking steps to accommodate two million more births annually after a landmark decision last year to relax population controls.

Missing Plane Believed to Be Beyond Search Area

Michael Forsythe
New York Times
The search area in the Indian Ocean that recovery teams have been scouring for more than a month is probably not the final resting place of a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner.

India’s Modi and China’s Xi: Frenemies, or Just Plain Enemies?

Michael Schuman
Time
With two nationalists in power, relations between the world’s two most populous nations could turn even frostier.

China is Stealing a Strategic March on the US

David Pilling
Financial Times
Bit by bit Beijing is creating new facts, and with each incident, it throws down the gauntlet.

China’s Two Problems with the Uyghurs

Lisa Ross
Los Angeles Review of Books
Beijing has two problems with the Uyghurs, the Turkic-speaking, Central Asian people from China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. One problem is terrorism; the other problem is civil rights.

China Cleans Up the Internet by Squelching Dissent

Dexter Roberts
Businessweek
A new government campaign aims to crack down on spreading “rumors” and harmful information through chat groups on instant messaging services such as Tencent’s WeChat.

Excerpts

05.28.14

‘Staying’—An Excerpt from ‘People’s Republic of Amnesia’

Louisa Lim
Zhang Ming has become used to his appearance startling small children. Skeletally thin, with cheeks sunk deep into his face, he walked gingerly across the cream-colored hotel lobby as if his limbs were made of glass. On his forehead were two large,...

China Sentences 55 in Xinjiang Mass Trial

Michael Martina and Li Hui
Reuters
The public sentencing, reminiscent of China's revolutionary era rallies, attracted a crowd of 7,000 at a sports stadium in Yining city in the northern prefecture of Yili.

Your 3-Letter Guide to the Latest News From China

James Fallows
Atlantic
Those three letters are B, A, and D.

Why Vietnam Can’t Count on Its Neighbors to Rally Against China

Bruce Einhorn
Businessweek
China knows Vietnam can do little to stop it; while an appeal by Vietnam to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations could make the fight more equal, it’s not likely to be very effective.

China Said to Deport Models for Working Illegally

Edward Wong
New York Times
Chinese authorities have deported scores of foreign models whom they detained earlier this month in Beijing on accusations that the models were working illegally, said a model who once worked in China.

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...

International China Welcomes New Indian Government

Associated Press
China is "ready to work with the new Indian government to maintain high-level contact, strengthen cooperation and communication in all areas," former Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told Ambassador Ashok Kumar Kantha.

Features

05.27.14

China’s Experiment with Deliberative Democracy

Rebecca Liao
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...

China’s New Diplomatic Strategy in Africa: Humility

Eric Olander & Cobus van Staden
Just a few weeks after Chinese premier Li Keqiang admitted that China was going through “growing pains” in its engagement with Africa, Beijing’s central bank chief, Zhou Xiaochuan, acknowledged some of the 2,500 PRC companies operating in Africa are...