Environment

03.10.16

How China’s 13th Five-Year Plan Addresses Energy and the Environment

Deborah Seligsohn & Angel Hsu
For the first time ever, a senior Chinese leader announced in his work report to the National People’s Congress—his most important formal speech of the year—that environmental violators and those who fail to report such violations will be “severely...

Q. and A.: How China’s National People’s Congress Works

Austin Ramzy
New York Times
The annual session of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, is intended to convey the image of a transparent, responsive government.

In Xi Jinping’s Tears, a Message for China’s People

Austin Ramzy
New York Times
It’s all right to cry, even when you’re the leader of the world’s most populous nation.

China Corruption Crackdown ‘Netted 300,000 in 2015’

BBC
China's ruling Communist Party says it punished nearly 300,000 officials last year for corruption.

Media

03.04.16

China’s Coming Ideological Wars

Taisu Zhang
For most Chinese, the 1990s were a period of intense material pragmatism. Economic development was the paramount social and political concern, while the various state ideologies that had guided policy during the initial decades of the People’s...

Chinese Propaganda Machine Places Hopes in Cartoon Rappers

Associated Press
What's the world's largest propaganda organ to do when it can't get young Chinese to pay attention to the latest Communist Party slogans?

U.S. Proposes Reviving Naval Coalition to Balance China’s Expansion

Ellen Barry
New York Times
Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command proposed reviving a coalition that had collapsed because of protests from China.

Why You Should Care about China's National People's Congress

Karishma Vaswani
BBC
It is an opportunity to gauge what Chinese leaders may be thinking about the economy.

Conversation

03.04.16

Xi Jinping: A Cult of Personality?

Jonathan Landreth, Taisu Zhang & more
By some accounts, Chinese Presdient Xi Jinping is the most powerful leader the country has  had since Mao Zedong. One arrow in his quiver that echoes Mao’s armory is Xi’s embrace of popular song, listened to these days not on the radio or...

Five Things to Know About China’s ‘Two Sessions’

Charlie Campbell
Time
China’s governing class descends on Beijing this week for the nation’s top two annual political meetings.

Read and delete: How Weibo's censors tackle dissent and free speech

Committee to Protect Journalists
A former employee gives insight into how Weibo balances the demands of government censorship with the need to attract users.

China’s Xi Jinping Puts Loyalty to the Test at Congress

Chun Han Wong
Wall Street Journal
President focuses on party discipline, as corruption crackdown has unsettled Chinese officials.

Dodging Critics and Soothing Fears, China Meets Its G-20 Goals

Bloomberg
China pulled off a win at the Shanghai Group of 20 meeting of global finance leaders after months of angst abroad over economic and policy direction.

Media

03.01.16

Why China Isn’t Hosting Syrian Refugees

The civil war in Syria, now spanning almost half a decade, and the Islamic State’s territorial advances there have led to the world’s worst refugee crisis in decades. More than 4.7 million Syrians have left their homeland, pouring into neighboring...

China Will Set Plan for Raising Retirement Age Next Year: Media

Chen Aizhu and Clark Li
Reuters
China, whose state pension fund is under pressure to break even, will formalize a plan in 2017 to raise the official retirement age.

China Warns U.S. After Trump Wins Nevada Caucus

Bill Gertz
Washington Free Beacon
China warned the U.S. not to adopt punitive currency policies that could disrupt U.S.-China relations after Donald Trump’s win in the Nevada caucus.

Chinese Censors Have Taken a Popular Gay Drama Offline and Viewers Aren’t Happy

Charlie Campbell
Time
Online discussions garnered more than 110 million responses within a day of the show's cancelation.

U.S. and China Agree on Proposal for Tougher North Korea Sanctions

Somini Sengupta
New York Times
The two countries reached a resolution after intense negotiations over the last seven weeks.

Viewpoint

02.25.16

A Looming Crisis for China’s Legal System

Jerome A. Cohen
In China, politics continues to control law. The current leadership has rejected many of the universal legal values that China accepted—at least in principle—under communist rule in some earlier eras. Today, for example, to talk freely about...

Books

02.23.16

The Diplomacy of Migration

Meredith Oyen
During the Cold War, both Chinese and American officials employed a wide range of migration policies and practices to pursue legitimacy, security, and prestige. They focused on allowing or restricting immigration, assigning refugee status, facilitating student exchanges, and enforcing deportations. The Diplomacy of Migration focuses on the role these practices played in the relationship between the United States and the Republic of China both before and after the move to Taiwan. Meredith Oyen identifies three patterns of migration diplomacy: migration legislation as a tool to achieve foreign policy goals, migrants as subjects of diplomacy and propaganda, and migration controls that shaped the Chinese American community.Using sources from diplomatic and governmental archives in the United States, the Republic of China on Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, and the United Kingdom, Oyen applies a truly transnational perspective. The Diplomacy of Migration combines important innovations in the field of diplomatic history with new international trends in migration history to show that even though migration issues were often considered “low stakes” or “low risk” by foreign policy professionals concerned with Cold War politics and the nuclear age, they were neither “no risk” nor unimportant to larger goals. Instead, migration diplomacy became a means of facilitating other foreign policy priorities, even when doing so came at great cost for migrants themselves. —Cornell University Press{chop}Correction: Meredith Oyen’s employer was misidentified in an earlier version of this video. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Conversation

02.23.16

How Long Can China’s Internet Thrive if the Rest of the World Gets Shut Out?

David Schlesinger, Jeff South & more
Last week, Chinese authorities announced that as of March 10, foreign-invested companies would not be allowed to publish anything on the Chinese Internet unless they have obtained government permission to publish with a Chinese partner. What does...

Sinica Podcast

02.22.16

Allegiance

Kaiser Kuo & Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
Kaiser and Jeremy recorded today’s show from New York, where they waylaid Holly Chang, founder of Project Pengyou and now Acting Executive Director of the Committee of 100, for a discussion on spying, stealing commercial spying, spying, and Broadway...

China Signals no South China Sea Backdown as Foreign Minister Goes to U.S.

Ben Blanchard
Reuters
Beijing has rattled nerves with construction and reclamation activities on the islands it occupies.

China’s Excess Production Has Intensified Slowdown, Business Group Says

Javier Hernandez
New York Times
The failure of Chinese leaders to tackle the problem of excess industrial production has intensified an economic slowdown.

Media

02.19.16

New Video Celebrates Chinese Missiles With Old-School Communist Pomp

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian
Trumpets sound and trombones blare as a warhead launches. Intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on trucks parade down the center of a boulevard crowded with bystanders. “We are the glorious Rocket Force,” a mixed choir sings in a Soviet-...

Conversation

02.18.16

‘Rule by Fear?’

Eva Pils, Taisu Zhang & more
In the just over three years since Xi Jinping assumed leadership of China, observers and scholars of the country have increasingly coalesced around the idea that Xi’s term in office has coincided with a shift in the tone, if not the practice, of...

Why Did China Kidnap Its Provocateurs?

Barbara Demick
New Yorker
China’s harsh treatment of its critics is notorious, but the recent abductions of five booksellers and a journalist have sparked international condemnation and heated protests.

Obama to Veto Bill to Rename Washington Street After Jailed China Dissident

Simon Denyer
Washington Post
Liu Xiaobo, who in 2009 was sentenced to 11 years in jail on charges of inciting state subversion.

Senate Approves New North Korea Sanctions

Ted Barrett
CNN
The Senate approved sanctions against North Korea for carrying out missile tests, cybersecurity attacks and human rights abuses.

China’s Risky Gamble to Become a Major Player in the Middle East and North Africa

Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more
Chinese president Xi Jinping’s three-country tour of the Middle East and North Africa offers yet another example of Beijing’s expanding drive for increased global influence. During his first visit to the region, Xi traveled to Saudi Arabia, Egypt,...

Invisible Bridges: Life Along the Chinese-Russian Border

New Yorker
Is the new friendship between Russia and China real?

Will China Take Kim Jong-Un's Insult Lying Down?

Robert A. Manning
Newsweek
North Korea has conducted a nuclear weapon test and an intercontinental ballistic missile test as Beijing tries to repair frayed ties with Pyongyang.

Where Are All the Women in China’s Anticorruption Campaign?

Rachel Brown
Council on Foreign Relations
Women make up just over 2 percent of the “tigers” brought down by corruption.

Conversation

02.09.16

What New Approach Should the U.S. and China Take to North Korea?

John Delury, Seong-Hyon Lee & more
On Sunday, North Korea launched a long range rocket many see as a test of its capability to launch a missile attack against the U.S., defying both American and Chinese pressure not do so. Republican U.S. presidential candidates argued Washington...

China’s Message to Dissenters: Flee If You Dare

Patrick Winn
USA Today
Recent months have seen an unprecedented expansion of China’s power to snatch up detractors across borders.

Q. and A.: Yan Xuetong Urges China to Adopt a More Assertive Foreign Policy

Yufan Huang
New York Times
Director at Tsinghua University advocates "moral realism" as China challenges the US for world leadership.

Why Are Tibetans Setting Themselves on Fire?

Tsering Woeser from New York Review of Books
February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the...

Invisible Bridges

Peter Hessler, photo by Davide...
New Yorker
Over the past two centuries, there have been periodic tensions between Russia and China, including some serious border conflicts, and historically Russia has usually held the upper hand. But nowadays, at the personal level, Monteleone notices a...

China Struggles for Balance in Response to North Korea’s Boldness

Jane Perlez and Choe Sang-Hun
New York Times
North Korea's Kim Jong-un emphatically ignores China’s entreaties to refrain from launching a rocket.

How Japan Sees China’s Island Building Problem

Everett Rosenfeld
CNBC
Japanese deputy foreign minister said Tokyo views Beijing's seizures and buildup on islands and reefs in the South China Sea as a "problem."

Xi Jinping Assuming New Status as China’s ‘Core’ Leader

Chris Buckley
New York Times
A new push to praise him as China’s “core” leader, a term resonant with the formidable stature once held by Deng Xiaoping, suggests that his steely quest for dominance is not over.

Conversation

02.02.16

How Close Was the Latest Close Call in the South China Sea?

Julian G. Ku, Feng Zhang & more
Had things in fact calmed down in recent weeks as the Chinese official press claimed, only to be stirred up again needlessly by another Freedom of Navigation sail by the U.S. Navy?

Caixin Media

02.01.16

Tough Times call for Tougher Reform Push

Beijing has has done a good job in terms of industrializing the country but will face unprecedented challenges when dealing with a service-driven economy.

Reports

02.01.16

Xi Jinping on the Global Stage

Robert D. Blackwill and Kurt M. Campbell
Council on Foreign Relations
Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, and with his sweeping actions and ambitious directives he has fundamentally altered the process by which China’s domestic and foreign policy is formulated and implemented. Xi’s...

Media

01.29.16

‘The New Yorker’ on China

Jiayang Fan, Peter Hessler & more
Following is an edited transcript of a live event hosted at Asia Society New York on December 17, 2015, “ChinaFile Presents: The New Yorker On China.” (The full video appears above.) The evening, introduced by Asia Society President Josette Sheeran...

Media

01.29.16

‘I Don't Want to Think About Activating Change’

Eric Fish from Asia Blog
In 2012, The New York Times published a groundbreaking investigative report showing that the family of Wen Jiabao, China’s then-prime minister, possessed wealth in excess of $2.7 billion. In response, the Chinese government blocked the Times’...

Viewpoint

01.28.16

The Trouble with Hong Kong’s Chief Executives

Denise Y. Ho & Alyssa King
On January 14, the trial of Sir Donald Tsang, Hong Kong’s former chief executive who served from 2005 to 2012, was set for January 3 of 2017. This past December, Tsang pleaded not guilty to two counts of misconduct in public office, charges on which...

Conversation

01.27.16

Is George Soros Right that China’s Headed for a Hard Landing?

Arthur R. Kroeber, Stephen S. Roach & more
On Tuesday in an article headlined, “Declaring War on China’s Currency? Ha ha,” the People’s Daily attacked billionaire investor George Soros for suggesting he might short the renminbi. The Chinese currency has dropped 5.7 percent since August when...

China: Surviving the Camps

Zha Jianying from New York Review of Books
By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-...

China Deepens Its Footprint in Iran After Lifting Sanctions

Thomas Erdbrink
New York Times
Both countries agreed to increase trade to $600 billion in the coming decade.

‘My Personal Vendetta’

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
The presumed kidnapping of the Hong Kong bookseller and British citizen Lee Bo late last year has brought international attention to the challenges faced by the Hong Kong publishing business. During a break from The New York Review’s conference on...

Viewpoint

01.21.16

After a Landslide Election, Now Comes the Hard Part for Taiwan's President

William Kazer
Taiwan elected its first woman president on Saturday in a landslide victory that brought a nominally pro-independence party back to power after eight years in opposition.Tsai Ing-wen led her Democratic Progressive Party to a thumping victory,...

Conversation

01.20.16

Beijing’s Televised Confessions

Jeremy Goldkorn, David Bandurski & more
Recent days have seen two more in a long string of televised “confessions” on China Central Television, that of Swedish human rights activist Peter Dahlin and Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai. Did these gentlemen break any Chinese laws? What do these...

Caixin Media

01.19.16

Why China Doesn’t Publish Fatal Train Crash Data

Disputes between the two agencies running the trains in China over how to classify and publish details on fatal railroad incidents has kept reports on some fatal accidents last year from surfacing, people close to the matter say. Several employees...

Wang Qishan, China’s Anti-Corruption Tsar

Jamil Anderlini
Financial Times
The anti-corruption drive has been the central policy of this administration and its duration and severity have surprised almost everyone, not least the bureaucrats who have been its primary targets.

For U.S, Taiwan Vote Changes Calculus over 'One China'

Andrew Browne
Wall Street Journal
Washington less likely to indulge Beijing over its policy after victory of island’s pro-independence party

Postcard

01.18.16

A People’s Friendship

James Palmer
It takes a brave man to jump off a moving train for the sake of a sale, but the clothes hawkers had the easy courage of men who did this on the regular. I watched as they leapt off the front carriage as the train chugged into a station with no stop...