They’re Dying at Their Desks in China as Epidemic of Stress Proves Fatal

Shai Oster
Bloomberg
China is facing an epidemic of overwork, to hear the state-controlled press and Chinese social media tell it.

Undercover Sex Tape Deepens GSK’s China Scandal

Harriet Dennys
Telegraph
GlaxoSmithKline has confirmed the existence of a sex tape featuring Mark Reilly, the former manager at the centre of the company's corruption investigation.

Books

06.25.14

Tiananmen Exiles

Rowena Xiaoqing He
In the spring of 1989, millions of citizens across China took to the streets in a nationwide uprising against government corruption and authoritarian rule. What began with widespread hope for political reform ended with the People's Liberation Army firing on unarmed citizens in the capital city of Beijing, and those leaders who survived the crackdown became wanted criminals overnight. Among the witnesses to this unprecedented popular movement was Rowena Xiaoqing He, who would later join former student leaders and other exiles in North America, where she has worked tirelessly for over a decade to keep the memory of the Tiananmen Movement alive. This moving oral history interweaves He's own experiences with the accounts of three student leaders exiled from China. Here, in their own words, they describe their childhoods during Mao's Cultural Revolution, their political activism, the bitter disappointments of 1989, and the profound contradictions and challenges they face as exiles. Variously labeled as heroes, victims, and traitors in the years after Tiananmen, these individuals tell difficult stories of thwarted ideals and disconnection that nonetheless embody the hope for a freer China and a more just world. —Palgrave Macmillan {chop}

Web Preaches Jihad to China's Muslim Uighurs

Jeremy Page and Ned Levin
Wall Street Journal
China says the Internet and social media incite terrorism among Uighur minority.

Media

06.24.14

The President China Never Had

David Wertime
An activist lawyer heroically risks everything for his beliefs. Although he fails, his brave stand against authoritarianism wins him lasting admiration and changes the fate of his East Asian nation forever. The plot may sound seditious in mainland...

China Confirms Deadly Xinjiang Attack, Shows Graphic Footage of October Violence

Globe and Mail
Chinese authorities have confirmed an attack on security personal at a checkpoint in the restive far western region of Xinjiang, which a U.S.-backed radio service said left five dead.

Conversation

06.23.14

The Debate Over Confucius Institutes

Robert Kapp, Jeffrey Wasserstrom & more
Last week, the American Association of University Professors joined a growing chorus of voices calling on North American universities to rethink their relationship with Confucius Institutes, the state-sponsored Chinese-language programs...

Paramount Rushes for Beijing ‘Transformers’ Premiere Amid Dispute

Julie Makinen
Los Angeles Times
The studio was hit by claims of a product-placement deal gone sour.

Yang Lan, the ‘Oprah of China,’ Expands Her Reach

Lily Rothman
Time
Yang Lan is partnering with MAKERS to bring the women's-stories platform to China.

Sinica Podcast

06.20.14

Isolda Morillo: Una Vida en China

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, Kaiser and Jeremy are delighted to be joined by Isolda Morillo, a Peruvian journalist for the Associated Press whose life story is as interesting as they come. Growing up in Beijing in the 1980s, where she attended local schools...

China Bans Unauthorized Critical Coverage by Journalists

Megha Rajagopalan
Reuters
Reporters in China are forbidden from publishing critical reports without the approval of their employer, one of China’s top media regulators said on Wednesday.

Media

06.18.14

Leaning In ... to Corruption

It's no secret that graft is an essential part of climbing the Chinese Communist Party ranks. Now, according to Chinese state media, ambitious female cadres are increasingly being caught taking bribes and trading favors. On June 16, the state-...

Books

06.18.14

The People’s Republic of Amnesia

Louisa Lim
On June 4, 1989, People's Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, killing untold hundreds of people. A quarter-century later, this defining event remains buried in China's modern history, successfully expunged from collective memory. In The People's Republic of Amnesia, NPR correspondent Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4th changed China, and how China changed the events of June 4th by rewriting its own history.{node, 5555}Lim reveals new details about those fateful days, including how one of the country's most senior politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, as well as the inside story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square. She also introduces us to individuals whose lives were transformed by the events of Tiananmen Square, such as a founder of the Tiananmen Mothers, whose son was shot by martial law troops; and one of the most important government officials in the country, who post-Tiananmen became one of its most prominent dissidents. And she examines how June 4th shaped China's national identity, fostering a generation of young nationalists, who know little and care less about 1989. For the first time, Lim uncovers the details of a brutal crackdown in a second Chinese city that until now has been a near-perfect case study in the state's ability to rewrite history, excising the most painful episodes. By tracking down eyewitnesses, discovering U.S. diplomatic cables, and combing through official Chinese records, Lim offers the first account of a story that has remained untold for a quarter of a century. The People's Republic of Amnesia is an original, powerfully gripping, and ultimately unforgettable book about a national tragedy and an unhealed wound. —Oxford University Press {chop}

China Arrests Rights Lawyer Who Fought Labor Camps

Gillian Wong
ABC
The dramatic turnaround of Pu Zhiqiang highlights the thin line that activist lawyers often find themselves having to walk if they seek to drum up public support for causes that embarrass the ruling Communist Party: success can come at great...

Is That Leg Loaded? Ai Weiwei Starts Web Craze With Mysterious ‘Leg-Gun’ Pose

Nell Frizzell
Guardian
The Chinese artist has sparked an internet meme by posting pictures of people with their legs raised and pointing like rifles. Is it his latest revolutionary act? A new dance craze? Or the next Angelina Jolie's thigh? We weigh up the options.

Angelina Jolie Angers China With Taiwan Comments

Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Guardian
The star, promoting Maleficent in Shanghai, said that her favorite Chinese director is Ang Lee – who is from Taiwan, a country still seen by many Chinese as a rogue state.

Instagram Grows in China, Despite Ban on Parent Facebook

Francis Bea
CNET
While Facebook itself is blocked by the Chinese government, Facebook-owned Instagram is growing fast in that country.

Hong Kong Media Worries Over China’s Reach as Ads Disappear

Michael Forsythe and Neil Gough
New York Times
In what may be a major escalation of pressure by mainland China on Hong Kong’s independent-minded news media, two major British banks have stopped advertising with one of the city’s biggest newspapers, a top media executive said.

China Media: White Paper on Hong Kong

BBC
Media in China give full support to an official document reaffirming total control over Hong Kong, while papers in the special administrative region express pessimism over the future.

Young Chinese Twitter User Arrested for Proposing Method to Spread Truth About June 4th Massacre

China Change
On Monday China’s state-run media outlet China News (中新网) reported that Beijing police had arrested a 22-year-old female for posting an article on Twitter that teaches how to use a pseudo base station “to send illegal information.”

Books

06.09.14

Voices from Tibet

Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, Edited and Translated by Violet S. Law
Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong are widely regarded as the most eloquent, insightful writers on contemporary Tibet. Their reportage on the economic exploitation, environmental degradation, cultural destruction, and political subjugation that plague the increasingly Han Chinese-dominated Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is as powerful as it is profound, ardent, and analytical in equal measure, and not in the least bit ideological. Voices from Tibet is a collection of essays and reportage in translation that captures the many facets of an unprecedented sea change wreaked by a rising China upon a scared land and its defenseless people. With the TAR in a virtual lockdown after the 2008 unrest, this book sheds important light on the simmering frustrations that touched off the unrest and Beijing’s stability über alles control tactics in its wake. The authors also interrogate longstanding assumptions about Tibetans’ political future. Woeser’s and Wang’s writings represent a rare Chinese view sympathetic to Tibetan causes, one that should resonate in many places confronting threats of cultural subjugation and economic domination by a non-indigenous power. —Hong Kong University Press {chop}

Accel’s Breyer to Partner With Venture Capital Firm in China

David Barboza
New York Times
James Breyer, the venture capitalist who made a fortune with an early bet on Facebook, is putting some of his winnings to work in partnership with Beijing-based IDG Capital to invest in tech start-ups.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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?

CCTV Africa: The Frontline of Soft-Power Diplomacy

Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more
Since its launch in 2012, CCTV Africa has grown considerably in its distribution and programming. However, the central question remains as to whether or not anyone is actually watching, to justify the massive investment undertaken by the Chinese...

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.

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.

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,...

Meet ‘Crazy Jack,’ China’s E-Commerce Titan

Alexa Olesen
Foreign Policy
A former employee says Jack Ma sees himself as an artist, not a businessman.

Your 3-Letter Guide to the Latest News From China

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

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.

China Calls Out Cisco For Cyber Snooping

Greg Morcroft
International Business Times
China Youth Daily claimed that Cisco, “carries on intimately with the U.S. government and military, exploiting its market advantage in the Chinese information networks." 

Wide Support on Chinese Social Media for Boat Attack

Didi Kirsten Tatlow
New York Times
After a Chinese fishing boat rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat near a Chinese deep sea oil rig placed in waters contested by both countries, social media reaction appeared overwhelmingly supportive — even bellicose.

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...

Investigation Confirms U.S. Snooping Activities Against China: Report

Xinhua
A Chinese Internet information body said an investigation has confirmed "the existence of snooping activities directed against China" by the U.S., as exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

A Scholarly Response to ‘Tiger Mom’: Happiness Matters, Too

Didi Kirsten Tatlow
New York Times
When a child scores 99 on a test, an American parent will lavish praise. But a Chinese parent will say: “What happened? Why didn’t you get 100?”

Media

05.23.14

“What’s Been Done to My Beautiful Homeland?”

Nigel Maiti, an ethnically Uighur host for Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, is a well-known and popular entertainer with more than 1 million followers on the social media site Sina Weibo. After 31 were killed by a coordinated bomb and truck attack at...

Books

05.22.14

Age of Ambition

Evan Osnos
From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals—fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture—consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth?Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail. —Farrar, Straus, and Giroux {chop}

“The Big Bang Theory” and Our Future with China

Evan Osnos
New Yorker
The United States has never faced a rival whose ordinary people lead lives that have so much in common with ours in America. (The Soviets did not get Carson.)

Media

05.20.14

Netizens Complain Chinese Government Was Slow to Respond to Violence in Vietnam

On May 18, Hong Lei, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said China “will suspend some of its plans for bilateral exchanges with Vietnam in response to the deadly violence against Chinese nationals in the country,” according to...

Tiananmen: How Wrong We Were

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
Twenty-five years ago to the day I write this, I watched and listened as thousands of Chinese citizens in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square dared to condemn their leaders. Some shouted “Premier Li Peng resign.” Even braver ones cried “Down with Deng...

Conversation

05.19.14

Is This the Best Response to China’s Cyber-Attacks? 

Robert Daly, Chen Weihua & more
On Monday, the United States Attorney General Eric Holder accused China of hacking American industrial giants such as U.S. Steel and Westinghouse Electric, making unprecedented criminal charges of cyper-espionage against Chinese...

Media

05.19.14

One Uighur Man’s Journey in Two Cultures

Over the past two months, the relationship between China’s estimated 10 million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people, most of whom follow some form of Sunni Islam, and the majority Han population has deteriorated after a series of violent incidents...

Caixin Media

05.19.14

“White Glove” Sisters at Center of Coal Country Graft Scandal

Two sisters with business savvy and important friends in high places are now the standout figures in the mysterious case of a former Shanxi province government official, Jin Daoming, charged with corruption.Few details of the Jin case have emerged...

Department of Justice Indicts Chinese Hackers: What Next?

Adam Segal
Council on Foreign Relations
The US indicted five Chinese military officers for cyberspying, but the Snowden revelations about alleged NSA activities make it hard to build support for diplomatic efforts from the rest of the world.

Viewpoint

05.16.14

Government Steps Up To Labor’s Demands

Kevin Slaten
On April 14, most of the 40,000 workers at the Dongguan Yue Yuen shoe factory—supplier to Nike, Adidas, and other international brands—began what would become a two-week work stoppage. While there are thousands of strikes in China every year, the...

Media

05.15.14

Evan Osnos: China’s ‘Age of Ambition’

Evan Osnos & Orville Schell
New Yorker correspondent Evan Osnos discusses his new book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, with Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations.{chop} 

Don’t Call Me Dude, Boss or Bro. It’s Comrade to You

Didi Kirsten Tatlow
New York Times
A new notice demands greater “naming discipline” from party members and officials, warning that using “vulgar” terms of address in the workplace was “wrecking inner-party democracy.” 

The Growing Allure of Designed-in-China Fashions

Christina Larson
Businessweek
Guo Pei, a couture designer based in Beijing, says she’s seeing increased demand for custom-made gowns as Chinese performers and socialites have more formal occasions to attend.

25 Years Ago: Zhao Ziyang Appears to Win Backing

China Digital Times
To commemorate the student movement, CDT is posting a series of original news articles from 1989, beginning with the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15 and continuing through the tumultuous spring.