Hong Kong is quickly approaching the 10th anniversary of its return to China, and for the most part things seem rosy. The economy is up, unemployment is down, no mysterious diseases or financial crises are wreaking havoc. And yet something keeps popping up that reflects Hong Kong’s continuing uncertainty as a place in China. That …

It’s a miracle. In the “debate” (and I used that word advisedly, these things are not real “debates”) last night among the Republican candidates for President in the United States, one of the questions actually had to do with China!
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the question was directed at one of the …

A further thought on 2008, the Olympics and the outside world: one of things Beijing is no doubt grateful for is that China is NOT, at least for now, an issue in the American 2008 presidential campaign. As far as foreign affairs, it’s pretty much all Iraq all the time right now. (If you want evidence of this, listen to Tim Russert’s …

As Simon wrote below, between now and and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, one of the most interesting spectator sports is going to be how the world tries to muscle in and influence Chinese policies that some find objectionable (Tibet, Darfur, environmental degradation etc etc)–and China’s efforts to deflect that pressure. This has …

I was just up in Beijing, for the first time since last summer, and came across something small but revolutionary: polling, in the airport. So it’s not quite universal suffrage. It’s more surveying than ballot casting. And it’s to appraise the performance of passport control, not state leaders. But I’ll take it.

The first clue was the …

The China Daily, an English-language, government run paper, reported some scary stnumbers today in a story about China’s current stock market frenzy. In Shanghai alone, the paper said, some $9.1 billion was transferred from savings accounts to stock trading accounts in the first four months of the year. The main market index has risen …

Following on from Bill Powell’s post below about the fake People’s Daily editor, it is well worth noting that while there are undoubtedly many con artists like this around, branding someone a fake or extortionist pretending to be a reporter is a well worn tactic used by the local authorities when they wish to rid themselves of pesky …

Uriel Sinai / Getty

As Bill Powell says, the Darfur issue –the picture above is of a refugee being treated in a camp in neighboring Chad— is going to haunt Beijing until the Olympics. Now it appears that the cadres are waking up to the fact they may have a problem and beginning the diplomatic dance necessary to deal with it. A …

Divestment campaigns. Boycotts. UN-approved sanctions. Economic pressure– driven by both governments as well as NGOS, human rights groups as well as some pension funds– is an increasingly contentious part of the debate about Iran (and its nuclear program) and Darfur (and its ongoing human rights travesty).
China is at the center of …

Journalism, as practiced in China by genuine Chinese journalists—genuine in the sense of trying to report something other than the Party line– is a tough business. Reporters and editors constantly have to figure out much of the Party’s ire they can risk without having the hammer come down on them. Dismissal—or worse—can always …

Peter Parks / AFP / Getty

Our office received a visit today from 杜斌/ Du Pin a Chinese photographer who has spent much of his time in recent years recording the lives and suffering of China’s millions of petitioners. These are individuals who have exhausted their formal legal avenues of redress and are obliged to resort to an …

From AFP, an interesting story about veteran journalist Peter Arnett teaching for a semester at Shantou University in Guangdong. Arnett says he found the environment much more open than he expected:

But while the Chinese government appears to be tightening its already formidable control over all forms of information, Arnett says he has

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The Director of China’s Family Planning Office, warned yesterday that “the world’s most populous country could face a ‘population rebound’ because the newly rich are ignoring population control laws and because of early marriages in rural areas.” The English-language China Daily reports that Zhang Weiqing went on to expand on his point, …