Features
12.10.14Why Beijing’s Troubles Could Get a Lot Worse
from Barron’s
Few foreigners know China as intimately as Anne Stevenson-Yang does. She has spent the bulk of her professional life there since first arriving in 1985, working as a journalist, magazine publisher, and software executive, with stints in between...
Features
12.05.14China’s Fallen Mighty [Updated]
Political infighting and purges have been hallmarks of the Chinese Communist Party since its earliest days but came to a peak during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, damaging the country and paralyzing the Party itself. When Mao died in 1976, it...
Features
11.06.14No Women Need Apply
“Applicants limited to male.” 23-year-old job-hunter Huang Rong (not her real name) noticed this line in a job announcement only after she had heard nothing from the recruiter and gone back to check the advertisement online. She had graduated from...
Features
08.14.14Making It in China and the U.S.
Emily Parker is a creator of Green Electronics: A U.S.-China Maker Challenge. The Green Electronics Challenge was an unprecedented collaboration between the New America Foundation, Arizona State University, Slate Magazine, China’s Tsinghua...
Features
06.03.14Voices 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...
Features
05.31.14Resources on the Tiananmen Square Protests: 25 Years Later
This June 4 marks 25 years since the military crackdown on student protestors in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, following months of demonstrations. This resource page includes links to our recently published pieces and to our archived...
Features
05.29.14Why Defenders of Killer Whales Are Worried About China
Late last year, the circus came to Hengqin. Trained elephants from Thailand, Russian jugglers and monkies, Kazakh horses, Bengal tigers, and Cuban acrobats descended on the once-sleepy island near Macau for China’s “First International Circus...
Features
05.27.14China’s Experiment with Deliberative Democracy
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...
Features
03.21.14Punching a Hole in the Great Firewall
In January, when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published its exposé of the use of offshore tax havens by Chinese politicians and business moguls, the Chinese government blocked access to the consortium’s website and to...
Features
02.14.14It’s Hard to Say ‘I Love You’ in Chinese
“We didn’t say ‘I love you,’” said Dr. Kaiping Peng, Associate Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. I’d ventured over to his China office on the campus of Beijing’s mighty Tsinghua University to talk to him...
Features
01.26.14For Freedom, Justice, and Love
from China Change
Following is legal activist Xu Zhiyong’s closing statement at the end of his trial in Beijing on January 22, 2014. According to his lawyer, Xu was only able to read “about ten minutes of it before the presiding judge stopped him, saying it was...
Features
11.08.13Document 9: A ChinaFile Translation
This weekend, China’s leaders gather in Beijing for meetings widely expected to determine the shape of China’s economy, as well as the nation’s progress, over the next decade. What exactly the outcome of this Third Plenum of the Eighteenth Party...
Features
10.25.13Bo Xilai May Have Gotten Off Easy
On October 25, the Shandong High People’s Court rejected the appeal of Bo Xilai, the former Party Secretary of Chongqing who on September 22 was convicted of bribe-taking, embezzlement, and abuse of power and sentenced to life in prison.At the end...
Features
07.24.13Carried Off
In March 2011, Rose Candis had the worst lunch of her life. Sitting at a restaurant in Shaoguan, a small city in South China, the American mother tried hard not to vomit while her traveling companion translated what the man they were eating with had...
Features
07.23.13Discrimination in China’s Schools
In a new report titled As Long As They Let Us Stay in Class: Barriers to Education for Persons with Disabilities in China, the New York-based non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) outlines systemic discrimination...
Features
06.06.13Bad Medicine
In 1967, as the United States sank into war in the jungles of Vietnam and China descended into the cataclysm of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese soldiers secretly fighting alongside the North Vietnamese also battled swarms of malarial mosquitoes...
Features
12.18.12College Graduates Compete for Jobs Sweeping Streets
from Tablet
Tong Peng spent six months discovering his bachelor’s degree was “worthless” before deciding to apply for a job as a street sweeper.He graduated from college in Harbin in June, 2012, not expecting to find it so tough to find work with a college...
Features
11.06.12Fragments of Cai Yang’s Life
The man suspected of smashing the skull of fifty-one-year-old Li Jianli, the owner of a Japanese automobile, has been arrested by police in Xi’an; he is twenty-one-year-old plasterer Cai Yang.Cai Yang came to Xi’an from his hometown of Nanyang [...
Features
10.11.12Will Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize Finally Mean Better Book Sales Abroad?
Literature in translation in the United States has wide but shallow roots, making English language stars out of the likes of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Haruki Murakami, but leaving most of China’s writers struggling to take hold. Now, veteran...
Features
09.18.12A Mosque of Their Own
The women of Sangpo know well they are the guardians of a 300-year-old custom that sets them apart in Islam and they are increasingly mindful that economic development could be that tradition’s undoing.Sangpo, a dusty hamlet about two hours from the...