Despite government meddling and rampant piracy, commercial television is surging in the Middle Kingdom
Category: AP China
China's leaders meet to plan economic future
China’s ruling Communist Party is meeting in Beijing to draw up its next five-year plan for the economy.
The agenda is secret but analysts say that instead of seeking a high rate of economic growth, China’s leaders want to close the gap between rich and poor and between coastal and inland areas.
Analysts will also be watching for signs of who will be China’s next leader – due to take office in 2012.
China's debate over universal values
It is not quite true that China is rejecting Western values such as democracy. Rather, it is fighting over them
Tears of Sichuan Province
This HBO documentary film was nominated for best documentary film in the 2010 Oscars. It is the story of a tragic (70,000 dead) earthquake in Sichuan province in 2008 and the reactions of the Chinese citizens. The film is, among other things, a statement about Chinese political culture.
The Breakup of China and Our Interest in It
Conclusion from The Atlantic in 1899:
“Is it for the benefit of the United States to deal with China as a vast unit under her native flag, or as fragments under many flags? That is what we have to decide…It is to be hoped that our government is silently exercising the utmost vigilance in behalf of our commercial privileges on the continent of Asia. Failure to do so might not be politically disastrous to the present administration, but posterity will not forgive nor history condone faults of omission or indifference after such warning as have already been given. Surely, no American administration would seriously contemplate the establishment of a dependency or protectorate on the mainland of China, while our interests there may be safeguarded by international control and reciprocity; but it is difficult to see how these securities can be obtained without more definite engagements on the part of our State Department than our uninformed public opinion now demands. Nevertheless, the signs of a healthy and growing interest are numerous.”
The more things change…
Google Exits China
A note from Google:
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
Farhad Manjoo from Slate weighs in
On the eve of Hillary Clinton’s speech in response to Google’s decision, Atlantic correspondent and New America board member James Fallows moderated a discussion involving Open Society Institute fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, Foreign Policy contributing editor Evgeny Morozov, Columbia Law School professor and Slate contributor Tim Wu, and Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, Alec Ross. Watch this lively panel debate.
China's state-owned enterprises: Nationalisation rides again
Do state firms have too much power? A case in Hebei stirs debate
Democracy, China and the Communist Party
Attempts to democratise the Communist Party have failed. Again
“INNER-PARTY democracy is the life of the party,” enthused China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, as he prepared to hand over to Hu Jintao seven years ago. It could, he said, promote democracy in the country as a whole. But Mr Hu’s cautious experiments with reform inside the party appear to have fizzled. So too, it seems, has his own commitment to the idea.
July 2009 Protests in Xinjiang
URUMQI, China – The Chinese state news agency reported Monday that 156 people were killed and more than 800 injured when rioters clashed with the police in a regional capital in western China after days of rising tensions between members of the Uighur ethnic group and Han Chinese.
The casualty toll, if confirmed, would make this the deadliest outbreak of violence in China in many years.
The rioting broke out Sunday afternoon in a large market area of Urumqi, the capital of the vast, restive desert region of Xinjiang, and lasted for several hours before riot police officers and paramilitary or military troops locked down the Uighur quarter of the city
Here’s Foreign Policy Magazine’s take on the protests (China’s Latest Tibet)
The Train to Tibet: What will the greatest rail journey on earth do to its destination?
The new Chinese train runs on the highest railroad in the world, traversing a region known for high-intensity earthquakes and low temperatures. It cost $3.2 billion to build and is an extraordinary feat of modern engineering. Beijing claims that the railroad, which began operation at the start of July, will help speed up the modernization of Tibet. Many critics, meanwhile, have denounced the railroad as a means for the Chinese authorities to strengthen their hold on Tibet, further settling the region with China’s ethnic majority, the Han Chinese. Tibet holds vast reserves of copper, iron, lead, zinc, and other minerals vital to China’s economic growth.
More from the New Yorker
Chinese aim for the Ivy League
The book spawned a genre, selling more than two million copies in China on the premise that any child, with the proper upbringing, could be Ivy League material.
Now, eight years after the publication of “Harvard Girl,” bookstore shelves here are laden with copycat titles like “How We Got Our Child Into Yale,” “Harvard Family Instruction” and “The Door of the Elite.”
Their increasing popularity points to the preoccupation – some might say a single-minded national obsession – of a growing number of middle-class Chinese parents: getting their children into America’s premier universities.
A 'Postcard' View Of China's Global Prominence
Journalist James Fallows explores China’s recent rise to power and what it means for the US in his new book of essays, Postcards Tomorrow Square.
A National Correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Fallows has been reporting on the economic and political transformation taking place in China since 2006.
Contradictions in China, and the rise of a family
The Lius are China’s first-generation billionaires, born into a world of Mao suits, food rations, price controls and Communist slogans. And the story of how they made their fortune is considered one of the guiding myths of China’s Communist party, a symbol of this country’s transformation over the last 30 years, since its unlikely embrace of capitalism. But their story also betrays the contradictions of modern China — a country where the average factory worker makes less than $50 a week.
“The puzzle is not why the Liu brothers succeeded, but why there are not more like them in China,” says Huang Yasheng, who teaches at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an expert on Chinese entrepreneurs. “Rural China represents a vast pool of entrepreneurial capabilities and substantial business opportunities.”
As the global economy enters its first drastic downturn since China opened to the world, analysts say this country is searching for a more sustainable path to growth.
Photo Essay: China’s 30 Years of Economic Overdrive
Explore this riveting collection of pictures which speak thousands of words about China’s transformation.
China defends human rights record
Foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said: “I hope that Amnesty International can take off the tinted glasses they have been wearing for years and see China in a fair and objective way, and do something more constructive.”
My Lecture on the Mao Years
Here is Mao’s China
Local Village Elections in the PRC
How and why did this transformation [of village elections] come about? And how do grassroots elections work in the context of continuing Chinese Communist Party rule? Whose interests do they serve? Answer these questions and more by reading: Village Elections: Democracy from the Bottom Up?
If you are interested, learn more by reading these 1 page articles:
Structural-Functional Anlaysis of the PRC
Use your textbook, the structural-functional flow chart I provided you with, the lecture notes I’ve provided, and the BBC site Inside China’s Ruling Party to learn the structures and functions of the institutional framework of the PRC.
This report for Congress could prove useful as well.
Be prepared for a quiz on this material. If you know how the PRC government works, the quiz will be easy. It is multiple choice and fill in the blank.
China by region
China is just one country, but it stretches further than the distance of London to Cairo or Washington to Caracas. Although its 1.3bn people share a nationality, there are many issues specific to individual regions.
Use the BBCs interactive map to read more about what matters most in different places.