China’s internet censors took down a popular influencer showing a tofu tank, which suddenly made this year internet users aware of an issue that was mostly ignored: Beijing’s tank man on June 4, 1989. Political expert Shaun Rein explains how the censor shot into his own food at ABC News.Read More →

How will people remember the Wuhan lockdown, two years ago at the start of the global coronavirus crisis, asks CFR-scholar Ian Johnson in a debate at the NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge on the book “The Wuhan Lockdown”, by Yang Guobin. How successful has the state been in suppressing the knowledge of this hiccup in communist rule in Wuhan, Ian Johnson asks the author.Read More →

Author Zhang Lijia talks about the importance of learning English, for herself and for the country, as anti-Western attitudes in China make it today less important for students to dive into learning English and other languages, she tells at the weblog of the China Institute.Read More →

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has proposed over Christmas rules for Chinese firms who want to apply for an IPO at overseas stock markets. But those new rules lack much-needed clarity, says financial expert Winston Wenyan Ma at CNBC. “Domestic companies need to comply with relevant provisions in the areas of foreign investment, cybersecurity and data security, a draft said, without much elaboration,” writes CNBC.Read More →

Africa is high on China’s diplomatic agenda, says Howard French, author of Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. China is winning in Africa for that reason, While the US is losing, he tells at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.Read More →

Former New York Times correspondent Howard French, author of  China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, discusses at the International Peace Institute how now two million Chinese immigrants and 2,500 Chinese companies build up an over US$200 billion trade between China and Africa.Read More →

China’s authorities first raised the number of allowed children from two to three per family, and might now even cancel all restrictions. Journalist Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus: A Novel(January 2017) on prostitution in China, looks at the troubled relationship between feminism and motherhood in her mother country, in an interview with the Italian publication Il Manifesto.Read More →