A Softer Touch on Soft Power

David Bandurski
China Media Project
Soft power has become strategically important for China because cultural productivity and influence are now regarded as important components of comprehensive national power.

Xi Stresses Adherence to Dialectical Materialism

Xinhua
China should not be judged by GDP alone, said the president. China should be judged by its transition in economic development, restructuring, dissolution of overcapacity and by the strength of the nation's commitment to an ecological society...

China Communist Party Magazine Blasts Professors Who Spread ‘Western Values’

George Chen
South China Morning Post
Party journal's commentary targets liberal academics after President Xi Jinping calls for 'ideological guidance' for teachers and students 

Bobby Jindal & China’s Louisiana Methanol Plant

Al Jazeera
A Chinese tycoon whose natural gas firm's environmental and labor rights record is under fire in the Chinese press is parking assets in a multibillion dollar methanol plant in Louisiana.

Conversation

01.26.15

Does Size Matter? (In the U.S. and Chinese Economies, That Is...)

Taisu Zhang
Last week, President Obama’s State of the Union Address touted a U.S. economic recovery. Meanwhile, China’s economic growth is slowing and Ma Jiantang, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, has said that China’s economy, contrary to overseas...

Sinica Podcast

01.26.15

Inside the Property Revolution

Jeremy Goldkorn & Luigi Tomba from Sinica Podcast
Luigi Tomba, expert on municipal government in China, fellow at the Australian Centre on China and the World, and author of the book The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China, is this week's Sinica Podcast guest. Since 2005...

Death Threats and Dawn Raids: Welcome to China’s Anti-Graft Drive

Shai Oster
Bloomberg
On one side is Peking University Founder Group, a state-owned company that partnered with Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) in a separate securities joint venture whose chairman has disappeared.

South Africa: China’s BFF in Africa

Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more
South Africa is emerging as one of China’s most important international partners as the relationship deepens across all levels. Economically, South Africa is the source of more Chinese investment than any other country on the continent. However,...

The Pacific Power Index

Tea Leaf Nation Staff
Foreign Policy
The world's most important relationship isn't the superpower showdown most analysts would have you believe. It’s a constantly shifting, symbiotic relationship shaped by millions of people, not just officials in Washington and Beijing.

Who’s Afraid of China’s Economy Slowing? Not Alibaba’s Jack Ma

Nadia Damouni
Reuters
"If China still keeps 9 percent growth of the economy there must be something wrong. You will never see the blue sky. You will never see quality. China should pay attention to the quality of the economy," he said in a question-and-answer...

Obama’s Top Asia Adviser: Goal is for Complete Trade Pact in 2015

David Brunnstrom
Reuters
Evan Medeiros, senior director for Asia at the U.S. National Security Council, asked about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, said: "We are confident we can and we will get it done."

China Says Ousted Security Tsar’s Influence Corrupted Others

Megha Rajagopalan
Reuters
Last year, China arrested Zhou and expelled him from the party, accusing him of crimes ranging from taking bribes to leaking state secrets.

Chinese Director’s Film For Greenpeace Shows How Smog Changes Everything

Matt Sheehan
Huffington Post
The film follows families from Hebei, in heavily polluted industrial northern China, and from Beijing, the prosperous Chinese capital next door, that has seen epic pollution emergencies recently.

Xi’s Yunnan Visit Highlights Poverty Elimination, Ethnic Solidarity

Xinhua
Xinhua
President Xi Jinping seeks to rally support for a "tough battle" against poverty and to speed up growth in the country's relatively underdeveloped ethnic regions.

Don’t Worry About China Slowdown, Premier Li Tells Davos

Bonnie Cao, Zijing Wu, and Xin Zhou
Bloomberg
China will avoid a hard landing and is focused on ensuring long-term medium-to-fast growth, Premier Li Keqiang told global leaders in Davos.

Media

01.22.15

Xi Jinping’s Pay Raise

Alexa Olesen
It just got slightly less difficult to be a clean Chinese official. State media reported on January 20 that Chinese civil servants had received their first pay raise in ten years, a move that includes a 60 percent bump for President Xi Jinping and...

The South China Sea: Oil on Troubled Waters

The Economist
Economist
Two Chinese oil companies show contrasting approaches in their attempts to operate in the South China Sea where, to the discomfort of its smaller neighbours, China’s claims in disputed waters have grown increasingly assertive.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Can Help the U.S. Counter China’s Expansion

The Washington Post Editorial Board
Washington Post
We’ve faulted President Obama for his less-than-full-throated support of free-trade agreements that enjoy the nominal backing of his administration. There was no such cause for complaint about his State of the Union address Tuesday night, however,...

China Labor Activists Say Facing Unprecedented Intimidation

Alexandrea Hearney
Reuters
The number of strikes more than doubled in 2014 to 1,378 from 656 the year before, according to China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group. April saw the biggest strike in decades, when about 40,000 employees of Adidas and Nike supplier...

Excerpts

01.20.15

China’s Losing Bet Against History

Daniel Kliman
In 1991, Deng Xiaoping famously explained that in order to reassure the world of its peaceful intentions, China should “cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership...

Why Paul Krugman is Scared of China

Sophia Yan
CNN
"China scares me," he said Tuesday at the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong. "It scares me not because the policies have been wrong or anything, but because of the magnitude of the adjustment."

China’s Scramble for Africa

Richard Javad Heydarian
Al Jazeera
In a remarkable departure from its long history of low-profile foreign policy, especially since Deng Xiaoping took over China's leadership in the late 1970s, Beijing has recently committed up to 700 combat troops to South Sudan in the hopes of...

Caixin Media

01.20.15

Good Times Are Over for Local Governments

Two pieces of recent news have piqued the public's interest. First, local governments reported their latest debt figures to the Ministry of Finance. The numbers have not been made public, but sources say many officials reported large amounts in...

Sinica Podcast

01.19.15

China and Charlie

Kaiser Kuo & Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
First there were the terrorist attacks in Paris. And then there was the global reaction to the attacks, with its spate of frenzied free-speech cartooning. And then there was the counter-reaction to the initial reaction, which played out mostly on...

Food Detectives on a Tough Case

Peter Andrey Smith
New York Times
Behind the immaculate gray walls of the Customs and Border Protection’s laboratory here stands a cabinet containing three plastic vials filled with a sticky, yellowish substance. Honey, or so an importer has claimed.

As Growth Slows, China Pins Hopes on Consumer Spending

Alexandra Stevenson
New York Times
The economy increased by 7.3 percent in the last quarter of 2014 and 7.4 percent for the full year, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday. While many countries would welcome such growth, the rate fell short of the government’s...

5 Takeaways from China’s GDP

Richard Silk
Wall Street Journal
For much of the last two decades, China has been working overtime to drive the growth of the world economy. Now, it’s slowing to suborbital speeds.

The Dragon and the Gringo

The Economist
Economist
Time was when cash-strapped Latin American governments would turn to the IMF for the bitter medicine of its bail-outs. No longer. Over the past dozen years the supercycle of rising commodity prices has swelled the region’s coffers, while even the...

China Arrests 60,000 in ‘Unprecedented’ 100-Day Drug Crackdown

Eric Baculinao
NBC News
China's top anti-drug official said the mass arrests had "sown terror" among drug criminals, according to a report Thursday in China's state-run newspaper Legal Daily. Liu Yuejin told the newspaper that he had called on China...

Viewpoint

01.16.15

The Plight of China’s Rights Lawyers

Frances Eve
As the year came to a close, at least seven prominent Chinese human rights lawyers rang in the New Year from a jail cell. Under President Xi Jinping, 2014 was one of the worst years in recent memory for China’s embattled civil society. Bookending...

Macau Sex Ring Bust Shows China Expanding Crackdown on Graft

Liza Lin
Bloomberg
Police in the former Portuguese colony arrested Alan Ho, handcuffing him and covering his head with a black hood, for allegedly operating a prostitution ring out of the casino complex of his uncle, Stanley Ho.

Is ‘China’s Machiavelli’ Now Its Most Important Political Philosopher?

Ryan Mitchell
Diplomat
Much like a dragon, “the ruler of men has bristling scales. Only if a speaker can avoid brushing against them can he have any hope of success.”

Conversation

01.16.15

Why Did The West Weep for Paris But Not for Kunming?

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Taisu Zhang & more
In the days since the attacks that killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Chinese netizens have watched the outpouring of solidarity. As our colleagues at Foreign Policy reported earlier this week, the...

Viewpoint

01.15.15

Chinese Lawyers to Chinese Lawmakers: Let Us Defend Our Clients

Joshua Rosenzweig
Legal Opinion on Article 35 of the Ninth (Draft) Amendment to the Criminal Law: "We are a group of legal professionals who care about the rights of lawyers and reform of the judicial system and who have taken note of the draft for the Ninth...

‘Better Than Nothing’: U.K. Foreign Office Backs Beijing’s Hong Kong Reforms

Danny Lee
South China Morning Post
London is throwing its weight behind reform proposals in an attempt yet to heal a diplomatic rift with Beijing.

China Enlists Citizens to Patrol Border with North Korea

Sui-Lee Wee and Megha Rajagopalan
Reuters
China is sending civilian militias to help secure the border it shares with North Korea in the wake of two reported killings of Chinese citizens by North Koreans that could strain ties between Pyongyang and its sole major ally.

China Pollution: Beijing Smog Hits Hazardous Levels

BBC
BBC
Pollution has soared to hazardous levels in Beijing, reaching 20 times the limit recommended by the World Health Organisation.

American Film On A Tibetan Migrant Finds Unlikely Success In China

Frank Langfitt
NPR
Journalist Jocelyn Ford spent years documenting the life of Zanta, a Tibetan migrant who fled her poor, mountain village to build a life for herself and her son in Beijing.

One Among Many

The Economist
Economist
Across Africa, radio call-in programs are buzzing with tales of Africans, usually men, bemoaning the loss of their spouses and partners to rich Chinese men.

Obama’s Anti-Islamic State Push May Be Helping China Crack Down on Its Uighurs

Elias Groll
Foreign Policy
en President Barack Obama in September secured passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution requiring nations to prevent their citizens from traveling abroad to participate in acts of terrorism, it was mostly hailed as a landmark achievement to...

China Is Using ‘Charlie Hebdo’ to Justify Its Own Crackdown on Free Speech

Matt Schiavenza
New Republic
“The world is diverse and there should be limits on press freedom,” read the editorial by Paris bureau chief Ying Qiang. “Unfettered and unprincipled satire, humiliation, and free speech are not acceptable.”

Turks Are Held in Plot to Help Uighurs Leave China

New York Times
Shanghai police arrested 10 Turkish citizens and two Chinese citizens and accused them of providing altered Turkish passports to terrorist suspects from the western region of Xinjiang.

Sources: Nicolas Cage’s ‘Outcast’ Has Chinese Release Date Delayed Again

Clifford Coonan
Hollywood Reporter
There have been a host of theories about why Outcast is being delayed. Some distribution sources said in September that YFG was unhappy with the number of screens made available for the film.

China’s 109-Year-Old Dissenter Is Still Fighting for Democracy

Tom Hancock
Business Insider
Born when a Qing dynasty emperor was on the throne, the man who helped invent the Pinyin writing system used for transliterating Chinese worldwide turns 109 on Tuesday. But Zhou Youguang's outspoken support for democracy means his writings are...

The Colorful Propaganda of Xinjiang

BBC
BBC
The government believes religion breeds terror and has been trying to control religious expression in the region by imposing rules on the Uighur community. Critics say it is exacerbating the terror problem.

Xi Calls for More Anti-Corruption Efforts Despite Achievements

Xinhua
Xinhua
Misconduct may have abated but had not vanished, he said, and although counter-corruption mechanisms had been developed, they were not perfect and temptations still existed.

Hong Kong’s Leader Says Concessions to Protesters Could Lead to Anarchy

Chris Buckley
New York Times
Leung Chun-ying, the chief executive of Hong Kong, offered the proposals in his first major policy package since the street demonstrations ended last month. Since Mr. Leung came to office in 2012, he has repeatedly vowed to redress the city’s...

Good Times Are Over for Local Governments

Caixin
Two pieces of recent news have piqued the public's interest. First, local governments reported their latest debt figures to the Ministry of Finance. The numbers have not been made public, but sources say many officials reported large amounts in...

Media

01.13.15

‘Where’s Our Unity March?’ China Wants to Know

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian & Rachel Lu
The January 7 terrorist attack on satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 dead has mostly inspired unity in the West, but the massive march held in its aftermath is spurring controversy, and even some disdain, in China. While the...

Caixin Media

01.12.15

China Turning Gray Over Pension Reform Stress

About 8,000 teachers in the northeastern city of Zhaodong stayed home for three days in November to protest an experimental pension scheme they called tantamount to a pay cut.The teachers claimed they'd been illegally forced to participate in...

China Has Just Banned the Burqa in Its Biggest Muslim City

Quartz
Moves like these are likely to further alienate an already disenchanted minority group—the Uighurs, who feel their culture and economy is being overrun by Han Chinese.

Firebombs Thrown at Jimmy Lai’s Home and Company in Hong Kong

Austin Ramzy
New York Times
Apple Daily has been a vocal advocate of the recent demonstrations for expanded democracy in Hong Kong. Mr. Lai frequently attended the protests, which saw several main thoroughfares occupied for more than two months. He was arrested and released in...

The Abject Misery of Flying in China

Atlantic
On Friday, irate passengers forced open the emergency door of their airplane as it sat on a snowy runway. That was only the latest sign of trouble in Chinese air travel.

Why China Will Become a Global Military Power

Oriana Skylar Mastro
Lawfare Blog
To some, China is likely an expansionist country akin to Germany before WWI. Others argue that China’s assertive behavior in its regional offshore island disputes is simply a manifestation of the Chinese Communist Party’s focus on domestic stability...

In China, Projects to Make Great Wall Feel Small

David Barboza
New York Times
The plan here seems far-fetched—a $36 billion tunnel that would run twice the length of the one under the English Channel, and bore deep into one of Asia’s active earthquake zones. When completed, it would be the world’s longest underwater tunnel,...

Compilation of Xi Jinping’s Anti-Graft Remarks Published

Xinhua
Xinhua
A circular issued jointly by the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee and the CPC's discipline agency asked Party officials to take the essence of the remarks to heart and behave in line with the decisions so as to ensure an...

Chinese Spy Chief Ma Jian Detained as Corruption Crackdown Widens

Staff Reporters
South China Morning Post
It is not clear what triggered the probes, but it is believed to be linked to a high-profile anti-graft investigation into activities at the top of Founder Group, a Peking University-owned technology conglomerate.

China Steps up Political Arrests, Prosecutions

Agence France Presse
Agence France-Presse
A total of 2,318 people were arrested or indicted on charges of “endangering state security”, the US-based Dui Hua Foundation said, citing statistics from China’s central prosecution office. 

Environment

01.09.15

China’s Polluters Hit with Biggest-Ever Fines

from chinadialogue
Two days before a new environmental law came into effect, six polluting companies in Jiangsu were ordered by the province’s highest court to pay 160 million yuan ($26 million) in restoration costs for illegally dumping almost 25,000 tons of chemical...

Drawing the News: Wo Shi Chali (Je Suis Charlie)

Anne Henochowicz
China Digital Times
Chinese cartoonists and netizens have responded quickly to the slaying of cartoonists and editors at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo yesterday. Masked gunmen entered the offices of the journal and fired automatic weapons at staff in an...