Twenty years ago today, April 15th, Hu Yaobang died, and in response, China exploded. Hu Yaobang was a CCP leader, and the General Secretary of the Party from 1980 until 1987, when he was forced out by socialist hard-liners for advocating bourgeois liberalization. He was forced to write a self-criticism, and when he died...
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If you aren’t aware already, the Chinese government recently announced “a blueprint for health-care over the next decade”. The reforms are aimed at making healthcare more available and affordable. The ultimate goal: “By 2020, the world’s most populous country will have a basic health-care system that can provide “safe, effective, convenient and affordable” health...
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Recently, we translated an editorial piece by Hu Yong that stressed the importance of remembering the dead by keeping track of them individually, recognizing them as people instead of numbers. Specifically, Hu praised the efforts of famed artist and social commentator Ai Weiwei, who is currently in the process of investigating and publishing the...
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"I really didn’t know this was the last time I would ever see him. It never occurred to me. I told him I hadn’t been able to come see him before, and so came to see him now. I told him I believed he wouldn’t do anything to endanger the country or society. I...
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It’s funny how things turn out: after 60 years as an officially atheist country, it seems kind of hard to deny that religion is growing in China. That in and of itself doesn’t mean as much as one might think – after all, China has had religion for most of its history and the...
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At the risk of boring everyone and getting this website swept under the Great Firewall, we’ll add a few short thoughts about Tibet. As the CCP keeps a lockdown on Tibet, information is scarce and hard to come by, even more than usual. There’s a certain sore spot on China’s part against the Western...
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Gao Zhisheng is a Chinese firebrand lawyer-turned human rights activist. He’s taken up the cross for cases ranging from underground Christian sects to democracy activists, displaced homeowners and more. Gao’s opponent in and out of court has traditionally been one face or another of the CCP, and he’s been a thorn in the Party’s...
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Hillary Clinton is back from China and in some ways things haven’t looked rosier for US – China relations in the entirety of the CCP’s rule over the mainland. Questions about human rights in China are out of fashion in Washington and other, seemingly-less controversial issues that both parties are keen to cooperate on...
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We didn’t want to write about the shoe thing, but here we are, writing about the shoe thing. Everybody knows that a month and a half ago, someone chucked a shoe at former (!) President Bush during a press conference in Iraq. Much merriment was shared by all, and the Chinese netizens, as one...
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"A small group with ulterior motives", "the people unaware of the truth", "evil instigators behind the scenes"...Recently, shortly after large "mass incidents" one can always see the local government hastily determining in this way. Guizhou's "Weng'an Incident", Yunnan's "Menglian Incident", as well as Gansu's recent "Longnan Incident": early on...
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