A weekly roundup of news and analysis to help you follow key developments in China and the Chinese church.
Featured Article
Calling China’s New National Spy Hotline (November 2, 2015, China Real Time)
A man answering the hotline Monday afternoon said he didn’t know why the national hotline was not located in a more central city like Beijing or whether the government planned to set up a toll-free version. So far, he said, no one had called to report any suspicious activity.
Featured Article
New areas of the Forbidden City open to visitors (October 27, 2015, Jottings from the Granite Studio)
The Palace Museum at the Forbidden City opened four new areas to the public this past month, a move which coincided with the 90th anniversary of the museum’s founding. The opening of new spaces, and the unprecedented care to their renovation and restoration, should be welcome news to travelers and Beijing residents who had previously dismissed the Forbidden City as a vast array of sameness and symmetry.
Featured Article
University Of Illinois Engages Chinese Students With Mandarin Football Broadcast (October 16, 2015, NPR)
For the first time, Illinois football will have a Mandarin play-by-play and color team calling the game for streaming in China. The University of Illinois has a huge number of Chinese students, and the activity has been getting the community more involved in campus culture.
Featured Article
Nobel Renews Debate on Chinese Medicine (October 10, 2015, The New York Times)
These contrasts are part of a bigger, century-long debate in China that has been renewed by the award on Monday to one of the academy’s retired researchers, Tu Youyou, for extracting the malaria-fighting compound Artemisinin from the plant Artemisia annua. It was the first time China had won a Nobel Prize in a scientific discipline.
Featured Article
Population to peak in 2025 (October 7, 2015, China Daily)
A lower-than-expected fertility rate means China's population will peak in 2025, something the country's leadership will have to seriously consider when drawing up its forthcoming national development blueprint, said a senior Chinese demographic expert in Brussels. China's population is expected to peak at 1.41 billion in 2025 and the total population in 2050 will be much lower than it is today, said Zhang Juwei, director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Featured Article
“Masters of the People”: China’s New Urban Poor (September 23, 2015, Dissent)
The ranks of the poor in China today also include people who have lived in cities all their lives, and, as members of the industrial proletariat, were once considered “the masters of the people.”
Featured Article
China’s gospel valley: Churches thrive among the Lisu people (September 22, 2015, Christian Century)
Pastor Jesse’s mud-plastered Mitsubishi SUV jolted wildly along the newly dug dirt road that zigzagged up the mountainside toward the construction site of the new church. We stopped to let a pedestrian squeeze by, a middle-aged Lisu woman with a pink, checkered headscarf and a giant bamboo back basket which was strapped to her forehead. The Lisu are one of the 55 ethnic minorities of China and the predominant tribespeople in Gongshan, which nestles on the slope of the Gaoligongshan mountain range.
Featured Article
How the Piano Became Chinese (September 6, 2015, Caixin Online)
Indeed, though China in the 1600s had numerous rich musical traditions that employed both domestic and imported instruments, it had nothing resembling the clavichord, a stringed keyboard instrument and predecessor of the piano. That's why Ricci chose it, hoping that the unusual instrument would so excite the emperor's curiosity that he would agree to receive Ricci – who could then explain the precepts of Catholicism and, in his wildest dreams, get the emperor to convert, and with him, all of China.
Featured Article
Driven to Kill: Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit. (September 4, 2015, Slate)
Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions.
Featured Article
For China, a Plunge and a Reckoning (August 28, 2015, The Wall Street Journal)
Anyone trying to design an event to bring Xi Jinping ’s China back to Earth couldn’t have engineered something much more elegant than the turmoil in China’s financial markets and the resulting global aftershocks. The upheaval is traumatic for China’s leaders but not life-threatening to China’s system. Yet the jolt may have been just large enough to change the country’s underlying bargain between ruler and ruled—and by doing so, to temper Beijing’s current tendency toward arrogance, rigidity, belligerence and diplomatic hectoring.
Featured Article
China's 20 Percent Problem: Millennial Migrants' Discontent (August 25, 2015, Foreign Affairs)
What’s more, a rising generation of “millennial migrants” aspires to the same lifestyle and opportunities afforded their urban contemporaries. As a result, their expectations are shifting rapidly, increasing the possibility that their accumulated discontents will turn into a volatile force that catalyzes social instability.
Featured Article
He Xiaoxin: How Far Can I Go? How Much Can I Do? (August 15, 2015, China Digital Times)
Journalist He Xiaoxin (和小欣) of The Beijing Daily (北京日报) traveled to report from the scene of the massive explosion in a chemical warehouse at the Tianjin port, in which 112 people have been reported killed so far. Dramatic photos and videos of the explosion traveled quickly around the world via the Internet. But in this photo essay, He provides an up-close, personal look at the devastation. Propaganda officials have since banned media from reporting on the explosion or posting stories that did not originate from Xinhua.