Why Hong Kong Remains Vital to China’s Economy

S.R.
Economist
Foreign companies also use Hong Kong as their staging post for investing in China as it offers them something that no mainland city does: a stable investment environment, protected by long-established rule of law.Although much of this money is...

U.S. Should Send Signal to China in Support of Hong Kong Democracy Movement

Editorial Board
Washington Post
Washington can't protect Hong Kong’s democracy movement if Xi Jinping decides to crush it. But it should support its demand for genuine democracy and tell Beijing that using force would have consequences. 

Not Even the Great Firewall Can Shut Out News About Hong Kong’s Protests

Christina Larson
Businessweek
Sometime late Sunday, Instagram was blocked in mainland China, presumably to stop images from the tear gas-filled streets of downtown Hong Kong from being shared on the popular social network.

China’s Decision to Expel Journalists to Hong Kong is Now Blowing Up in its Face

Max Fisher
Vox
Hong Kong has one of the highest rates of Western journalists per capita of any non-Western city in the world, including a number of the best foreign correspondents in the business.

Censors in China Keep Mainlanders in Dark about Hong Kong Protests

Los Angeles Times
A near-complete information blackout by Chinese censors has blocked most people in mainland China from seeing sriking photos, videos and news about Hong Kong’s ongoing democracy protests.

Taking Aim at Hong Kong

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
A surge of emotion washed through me on Sunday night as I watched tens of thousands of protesters fill the streets of Hong Kong on television. It was the same feeling I had in Beijing on the nights leading up to the killings in Tiananmen Square on...

The Revolution Will Not Be Instagrammed

Alexa Olesen
Mainland Chinese felt no effects from the protests roiling Hong Kong—until Beijing pulled the plug on another social network.

Sinica Podcast

09.27.14

In Conversation with Mara Hvistendahl

Kaiser Kuo & Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
Kaiser and Jeremy are joined this week by Mara Hvistendahl, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author and long-standing resident of Shanghai, to discuss her two main works. Along with discussing the twists and turns of her murder novel, And the City Swallowed...

Conversation

09.26.14

Should the U.S. Cooperate with China on Terrorism?

Richard Bernstein, Ely Ratner & more
Richard Bernstein: Of course, they should.  But can they?  Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 in the United States, China has defined almost any dissent from its policies there as examples of international terrorism.  It...

Hong Kong Democracy Protesters Enter Government Complex

BBC
Students and activists have been protesting against a decision by Beijing to rule out fully democratic elections in Hong Kong in 2017.

China Ponders Slow-Growth Dilemma

Lingling Wei
Wall Street Journal
Leadership may have to sacrifice reform agenda to maintain 7.5% economic-growth target.

Hong Kong Democracy Leader Says Limits Harm Rest of China

Chris Buckley amd Michael Forsythe
New York Times
Chan Kin-man, one of the Occupy movement’s co-founders, said the group was nonetheless committed to peacefully “occupying” part of Hong Kong’s main financial district, called Central.

A New Central Banker for China?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/...
Economist
In the world of rumours, Zhou Xiaochuan, China’s central bank chief, has lost his job multiple times. First there was a 2007 reshuffle when he was pushed aside early in his tenure, sidelined to an academic role.

Reports: 50 Were Killed in China Clash

Callum MacLeod
USA Today
The latest violent clash in China's troubled Xinjiang region, described by authorities as a terrorist attack, was far more deadly than first reported, according to state media accounts.

Environment

09.25.14

New York Climate Summit Fails to Bridge Rich-Poor Divide

from chinadialogue
India reiterated its need to develop, China listed the steps it was taking and the United States repeated that all countries should control greenhouse-gas emissions.Despite notable advances in many areas, the special climate summit convened by...

Media

09.25.14

An Internet Where Nobody Says Anything

David Wertime
Here is what a court in Urumqi, the capital of China’s western Xinjiang region, concludes Ilham Tohti, a balding, thick-set, 44-year-old professor, did: “Using ‘Uighur Online’ as a platform, and taking advantage of his role as a university professor...

China Uncovers $10bn Fake Trades

BBC
China has uncovered $10bn worth of fake trades as part of a nationwide crackdown on companies. The nation's currency regulator said 15 fraud cases had been handed over to the police for prosecution.

UN Climate Summit: China Pledges Emissions Action

BBC
China has pledged for the first time to take firm action on climate change, telling a UN summit that its emissions, the world's highest, would soon peak.

Obama Presses Chinese on Global Warming

Mark Landler and Coral Davenport
New York Times
Declaring that the United States and China—the world’s two largest economies and largest polluters—bear a “special responsibility to lead,” Mr. Obama said, “That’s what big nations have to do.”

China Increasingly Producing ‘Tools of Torture’ for Export: Amnesty

Megha Rajagopalan
Reuters
The Chinese equipment, such as spiked batons, fuels human rights abuses by law enforcement authorities in African and Southeast Asian nations, the international human rights group said in a report.

Chinese Court Sentences Uighur Scholar to Life in Separatism Case

Edward Wong
New York Times
A university professor who has come to symbolize peaceful resistance by ethnic Uighurs to Chinese policies was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of separatism in the western region of Xinjiang.

Uighur Scholar Ilham Tohti Sentenced—A Moderate Silenced

Gady Epstein
Economist
Though he has always advocated nonviolence and says he opposes separatism, Mr Tohti appears to be paying a price for a series of episodes of violent unrest involving Uighurs.

Hong Kong Students Lead Democracy Fight With Class Boycott

Chris Buckley and Alan Wong
New York Times
Thousands of Hong Kong university students abandoned classes on Monday to rally against Chinese government limits on voting rights, a bellwether demonstration of the city’s appetite for turning smoldering discontent.

Hong Kong Tycoons Descend on Beijing for Xi Meeting

Joyce Ng and Jeffie Lam
South China Morning Post
Tung Chee-hwa leads 70-strong delegation to Beijing; members come out strongly against Occupy Central, saying don't harm Hong Kong

China’s Measured Embrace of India

Minghao Zhao
Project Syndicate
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to India, the main leg of a recent tour of Central and South Asia, sheds new light on China’s emerging approach to its neighbors, particularly Asia’s other giant.

‘They Don’t Want Moderate Uighurs’

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
In my series of interviews with Chinese intellectuals, there is an empty chair for Ilham Tohti, the economist and Uighur activist. It’s not that I hadn’t heard of him or hadn’t been in China long enough to have met him before he was arrested earlier...

China Clamps Down on Web, Pinching Companies Like Google

Keith Bradsher and Paul Mozur
New York Times
China's government has draped a darker shroud over Internet communications in recent weeks, a situation that has made it more difficult for Google and its customers to do business.

Beijing’s Rising Smear Power

Murong Xuecun
New York Times
Chinese dissidents are constantly subject to all sorts of harassment, including a vicious online smear campaign.

Conversation

09.19.14

China and Climate Change: What’s Next?

Angel Hsu & Barbara A. Finamore
Climate Week at the United Nations General Assembly is upon us and we asked a group of experts to bring us up-to-date about the areas where progress on climate change looks most possible for China, now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse...

Environment

09.19.14

Here’s How This Giant Chinese Forest Disappeared

Michael Zhao
In early August, Greenpeace China’s forest campaigner Wu Hao wrote a piece in the environmental section of the newspaper Southern Weekly about China’s astonishing rate of deforestation. He posted dramatic before and after satellite images of forests...

Viewpoint

09.18.14

More Exploitation, More Happiness

Kevin Slaten
It was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in recent Chinese history. On August 2, a massive metal dust explosion killed 75 workers and injured another 186 at a factory in Kunshan, in Jiangsu province, that supplied wheels to General Motors...

Uighur Scholar Ilham Tohti Goes on Trial in China on Separatist Charges

Edward Wong
New York Times
A conviction of Ilham Tohti for separatism could result in the death penalty, but in his case life imprisonment is likely to be the maximum punishment because of the specific charges.

China Says Anti-Monopoly Regulators Targeting More Chinese than Foreigners

Massoud Hayoun
Al Jazeera
Chinese diplomats say fewer than 10 percent of enterprises targeted for price fixing were foreign-funded.

China, the Climate and the Fate of the Planet

Jeff Goodell
Rolling Stone
If the world's biggest polluter doesn't radically reduce the amount of coal it burns, nothing anyone does to stabilize the climate will matter.

China Detains Writer Tie Liu for ‘Provoking Trouble’

BBC
Chinese writer Huang Zerong, also known as Tie Liu, has been detained by police allegedly for writing articles critical of a senior official.

U.S. Treasury Warns China Over Antimonopoly Efforts

Laurie Burkitt and Bob Davis
Wall Street Journal
U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew Issues Antimonopoly Warning in Letter to Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang

Conversation

09.12.14

Is a Trade War with China Looming?

Arthur R. Kroeber & Donald Clarke
As Alibaba gets ready to sell shares on Wall Street, U.S. investors will be focused on Chinese companies getting a fair shake here in America even as some big U.S. brand names (Microsoft, Chrysler, et al) are being shaken down by China's newly...

Journalists in China Describe Extortion

Chris Buckley`
New York Times
China’s corporate landscape is pitted with scandals involving corruption and news media have become a part of the problem by turning self-censorship and skewed reporting into a source of revenue.

Foreign Journalists in China See Decline in Reporting Conditions

Andrew Jacobs
New York Times
Conditions for foreign journalists working in China have gone from bad to worse over the past year, according to a report issued on Friday by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.

Environment

09.10.14

The Dark Side of the Boom

Isabel Hilton from chinadialogue
Just over a year ago, in July 2013, a report published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, put the health impacts of air pollution in China into an unusually clear framework: residents of south China, the report said...

China Asks U.S. to End Close-Up Military Surveillance

Jane Perlez
New York Times
The United States should halt its “close-in” aerial and naval surveillance of China, a senior Chinese military officer told Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s national security adviser.

U.S. Group Says China Could Be Violating Trade Accords

Neil Gough
New York Times
The US Chamber of Commerce, which is based in Washington, raises the possibility of a new approach to China’s increasingly vigilant antitrust actions: lodging a complaint at the World Trade Organization, which China joined in 2001.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice in China at Fraught Point in Relationship

Associated Press
Rice said Obama still considered China to be a priority and that her primary reason for coming to Beijing was to hammer out the agenda for the November meeting between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Can Frank Underwood Beat China’s Censors?

Adam Minter
Bloomberg
At first glance, the Chinese government’s announcement of regulations restricting foreign programming that can be shown on Chinese streaming-video sites would appear to be very bad news for business.

China Eases Credit Rules for Some Property Developers

Esther Fung
Wall Street Journal
The biggest of China's some 85,000 property developers are the only ones likely to benefit from this credit loosening. Authorities have been trying to streamline the number of companies as part of economic overhauls.

China to Limit Foreign TV Shows on Video-Streaming Sites

Lillian Lin
Wall Street Journal
Regulators expected to cap amount of imported television content at 30 percent.

Caixin Media

09.03.14

Beijing Must Address Claims of Anti-Foreign Bias

Once mocked as a “toothless tiger,” China’s anti-monopoly law is finally demonstrating some bite, six years after it took effect.The three agencies responsible for enforcing it—the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of...

Conversation

09.02.14

Hong Kong—Now What?

David Schlesinger, Mei Fong & more
David Schlesinger:Hong Kong’s tragedy is that its political consciousness began to awaken precisely at the time when its leverage with China was at its lowest ebb.Where once China needed Hong Kong as an entrepôt, legal center, financial center,...

Hong Kong’s Democracy Dilemma

Margaret Ng
New York Times
In a huge rally on Sunday in Hong Kong, democratic groups already were declaring a new era of civil disobedience.

China Accuses MPs of Hong Kong ‘Interference’

Laura Kuenssberg
BBC
The Chinese authorities have accused British MPs of interfering in Hong Kong's affairs.

China’s Hong Kong Mistake

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
The Beijing government has rejected demands for free, open elections for Hong Kong’s next chief executive, in 2017, enraging protesters who had called for broad rights to nominate candidates.

Viewpoint

08.28.14

China’s Nicaraguan Canal

Carlos F. Chamorro
While Nicaragua was once a central concern—indeed, almost an obsession—of Washington, as Sandinistas and Contras seemed to be battling for the soul of the Western Hemisphere, in more recent times our small and quite impoverished country has slipped...

China to Allow Foreign Ownership of Hospitals

Fanfan Wang
Wall Street Journal
China will let foreign companies own and operate hospitals in some parts of the country as part of an effort to overhaul its health-care system.

New Political News Website Scolded by Party Propaganda Officials for 'Incorrect Practices'

Chris Luo
South China Morning Post
Thepaper.cn given a 'stern warning' after it likely irked propaganda officials.

China’s Movie Industry: All That Glitters Isn’t Gold

Jeongwen Qiang and Chen Lin
Forbes
If we just looked at their success, on the surface, the Chinese film industry appears to be flourishing; but there is some cause for concern.

Beijing Independent Film Festival Shut Down by Chinese Authorities

Jonathan Kaiman
Guardian
Organizers forced to sign documents promising not to hold festival, as China's crackdown on freedom of speech continues.

Trust-busting in China

Economist
 Unequal before the law? China’s antitrust crackdown turns ugly, with foreign carmakers at the forefront.

Chinese Gadgets Signal New Era of Innovation

Paul Mozur
Wall Street Journal
Baseball Bat Sensors, Smart Bathroom Scales.

Under the Knife

Christopher Beam
New Yorker
 Why Chinese patients are turning against their doctors.

Wang Lixiong and Woeser: A Way Out of China’s Ethnic Unrest?

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Woeser and Wang Lixiong are two of China’s best-known thinkers on the government’s policy toward ethnic minorities. With violence in Tibet and Xinjiang now almost a monthly occurrence, I met them at their apartment in Beijing to talk about the issue...