Politics

Authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region rang in 2024 by announcing an update to the region’s strictures on religious practice. Changes include new rules to ensure that sites of religious worship, like mosques, look adequately “Chinese,” and to mandate the cultivation of “patriotic” religious leaders.

On March 13, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could result in TikTok’s being unable to do business in the U.S. What does the rapid passage of the bill in the House say about the state of Washington’s attitude to China? How would a potential sale work? How is Beijing likely to react? Is TikTok really a threat to the U.S.? What does the Act tell us about the state of the world and the global Internet in 2024?

Sholpan Amirkhan and her aunt gasped when the guards carried her brother-in-law Nurlan Pioner into the Jimunai County People’s Court, on the border with Kazakhstan in China’s western region of Xinjiang. He was gaunt, and a fetid smell followed him. When she shouted his name, she did not see any recognition on his face. He trembled, barely able to maintain a sitting posture as the guards settled him into the seat in the defendant’s cage. Here was a man that everyone in Amirkhan’s community adored and admired, a vital and eloquent religious leader wrecked by 14 months in detention.

The 1980s were an extraordinary time of hope in China, both for its citizens and for foreign visitors. Anne Stevenson-Yang first went to China in 1985, where she was enchanted by the lively cultural scene and what seemed to be the growing openness of the country’s political system. But there’s very little of that optimism left.

The U.S.-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, but it is at its worst point since President Richard Nixon visited in 1972—more than 50 years ago. Getting the relationship right is not easy, but getting it wrong is not an option. Universities have an opportunity and a responsibility to help, but they face headwinds. COVID closed the borders for three years, with only a trickle of American university students finding a way to study in China between 2020 and 2023. But deteriorating U.S.-China tensions, which began well before the pandemic and are ongoing, are causing students, faculty, and administrators to think twice about engagement since the borders..

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is one of the major spokes of Beijing’s multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious attempt to remake global trade and transport infrastructure. CPEC’s terminus is Gwadar, a port city in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, near the Iranian border. The plan for CPEC is to connect Gwadar with Xinjiang, the enormous “Uyghur Autonomous Region,” through a network of highways, railways, and pipelines. CPEC would boost trade between Pakistan and China, and give China access to the Indian Ocean for exports as well as a shorter route for imports of Middle Eastern oil. Despite growing local discontent and an insurgency that targ..

I’ve written all of this because friends urged me to offer some reflections on the year gone by and jot down a few thoughts for the upcoming year. But I didn’t want to waste my time looking up data points. Anyway, I don’t see that there was all that much difference between 1949 and 1979, nor for that matter can I detect how 1962 and 2022 were different.

Some observers have been predicting an economic collapse in China for decades. Others have long predicted that China would be stuck in a middle-income trap or some other type of economic stagnation. Might some of these predictions come true this time? What does the Year of the Dragon have in store for consumers, companies, and markets? What should we look out for this year to understand both China’s real economy and its financial sector?

In January, Radio Free Asia reported that the Chinese Communist Party is “taking a direct role in the running of universities across the country” by merging the presidents’ offices with their Party committees. Ideological controls on universities have been tightening for more than a decade. But this latest move may be even more dramatic: Although all universities have Party branches and committees, the Party has never directly controlled administrative offices. How are China’s universities going to change under the new system? Why is the Party doing this now?

Late last year, The New York Times reported on a new state-level bill in Florida that was creating unintended consequences for prospective Chinese graduate students. The bill restricts universities from accepting grants from or participating in partnerships with seven “countries of concern,” including China. Now, it is creating confusion among Florida universities unsure where Chinese graduate students fall under the confines of that law. It may have already succeeded in scaring off talented students who could make important research contributions, and universities have refrained from making offers until the law is clarified, the Times reported.

The Chinese Communist Party, an organization of over ninety million members, remains opaque to many outsiders, even within China. Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong spent years in Beijing documenting social, political, and economic changes as General Secretary Xi Jinping consolidated his power over the Party and country. Last year, Wong published Party of One, a portrait of the organization that rules China, and the man who rose to its top. Xi emerges in the book as a prisoner of the Party, and its history, as much as he is its leader. Wong spoke with Nick Frisch, a research fellow at Yale. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Nick Frisch: What misconceptions ..

On January 23, a large delegation of Chinese officials will appear at the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) to try to defend the indefensible. For the first time since 2018, China will undergo a Universal Periodic Review (UPR), in which UN member states evaluate one another’s human rights records. When Xi Jinping took power just over a decade ago, China was already an authoritarian, one-party state, but since then he has tightened control so severely that persecution of dissidents and government monitoring of virtually all areas of life have become common.

Lai Ching-te is now president-elect of Taiwan, after a hard-fought race in which Beijing made its preference for his opponents clear. Lai is an outspoken advocate for Taiwan’s sovereignty, though he has said he wants to keep the status quo with China and that there is no need to declare independence since it is already a de facto reality. How can Taipei best negotiate another rocky period with China? What role should Washington play—and what should it avoid?

We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 286 individuals, charge 156, and convict 68 as of the end of 2023. Reasons cited for some of the arrests in the second half of 2023 include wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong” and sharing social media posts of the “Glory” protest anthem. 10 people were arrested in August for their connection to the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which received donations to advocate for sanctions against Hong Kong and to assist organizations supporting people in exile. You can see ..

At the core of many EU Commission and member states’ recent discussions of China is the concept of “de-risking.” Distinct from “decoupling,” the concept focuses on mitigating risks and limiting strategic dependencies in Europe’s relationship with China. They would achieve this using the EU’s economic defenses more effectively and engaging in open and frank dialogue, while remaining open to targeted cooperation and economic ties that are considered “un-risky.”

Does the United States have more to fear from a powerful China that continues to strengthen or from a powerful China that begins to decline? While the question takes into account the economic, military, and diplomatic strides China has made over the past quarter-century—its starting point, after all, is that China is powerful—it seems to embed a questionable, two-part premise: that strategic competition between the United States and China will have a decisive resolution, and that Washington only has a narrow window in which to achieve that resolution on terms that it prefers or can at least accept.

Last May, in a meeting room at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat and listened as a delegate from my hometown of Hong Kong called me a liar. I was there as a representative from the civil society organization Hong Kong Watch, participating in a session on discrimination against women in China—which included the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).

This fall, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan noted that the Biden administration is “often asked about the end state of U.S. competition with China.” He argued that “we do not expect a transformative end state like the one that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Instead, the Biden administration has identified three lines of effort in U.S. relations with China: investing, aligning, and competing. Investing comprises domestic initiatives in the United States while aligning involves cooperation with allies and partners. Thus, the only portion of the Biden administration’s China strategy that explicitly centers on China is competition. Yet, competition does no..

In 2016, Chinese authorities began rounding up Uyghur intellectuals. Among those detained was Ababekri Muhtar, the founder of Misranim, a popular social media site used by Uyghurs to debate with and learn from each other. Muhtar relies on a wheelchair for mobility, but this did not exempt him from the brutal treatment authorities inflicted upon the Uyghurs they had detained. While he was later released without further explanation, his detention exposes an overlooked facet of China’s relentless persecution of Uyghurs. In its single-minded pursuit of cultural obliteration, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) targets all Uyghurs, leading to especially dire consequences for the most vulnera..

In October, in front of leaders from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, Xi Jinping stood triumphant in a celebratory keynote address celebrating the tenth birthday of his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The speech, delivered at the BRI Forum, championed the initiative’s successes and charted a path toward a version 2.0 that will be smaller, greener, and more focused on diplomacy. The speech depicted China as an alternative standards-setter for the developing world in artificial intelligence, climate resilience, and attainable modernization.

This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years.

Trade ties between the U.S. and China have undergone significant changes since the launch of the China in the World podcast 10 years ago. This episode helps shed light on the evolution of U.S.-China trade relations over that time.

In recent years, Beijing has made efforts to facilitate the settlement of China-Saudi oil trade in renminbi (RMB) rather than in U.S. dollars, a move that would steel China’s trade from financial sanctions and disrupt the global market for oil.

ChinaFile and The New York Review of Books co-hosted a panel discussion with Chinese journalists working from abroad. Participants included reporter, editor, and digital media entrepreneur Annie Jieping Zhang, New York Times columnist Li Yuan, investigative journalist and essayist Jiang Xue, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ian Johnson. ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief Susan Jakes moderated the conversation.

The past several years have seen declines in both the number of Chinese students studying in the U.S. and U.S. students studying China. We asked Chinese students studying, or who have recently completed their studies, in the U.S. why they chose to go to school in America and how the tense relationship between the U.S. and China has affected their studies and post-graduation plans.

In the last several years, an under-appreciated element of China’s retreat from the global stage has been diminished educational exchange, and particularly that exchange’s impact on students. During the height of the pandemic, tens of thousands of students globally waited for official approval to enter or return to China for their studies, while countries such as the U.S., U.K., and Australia, among others, reopened their borders to foreign students. While some institutions were able to make special arrangements for student exchanges earlier, China fully resumed student visa processing as a part of full easing on immigration guidelines in January of this year. However, steep flight costs..

In his article “Authoritarian Privacy” for the University of Chicago Law Review, Mark Jia writes: “Privacy laws are traditionally associated with democracy. Yet autocracies increasingly have them.” In this ChinaFile Q&A, Jia and Samm Sacks engage in an exchange about what has motivated the Chinese government to enact and enforce a range of laws on information privacy and the implications for understanding the role of privacy laws in non-democratic states. Samm Sacks: Outside observers have commented that China appears to have a split identity when it comes to privacy: rules limit how firms handle citizens’ data, while the state has unchecked surveillance powers. Is this dichotomy a..

On May 25, 2023, The New York Times published my guest essay “Like It or Not, America Needs Chinese Scientists,” on American higher education’s engagement with China in the STEM fields. The article was subsequently translated by the Chinese State-run Global Times newspaper without my prior knowledge or permission, appearing both in print and digital forms.The Global Times omitted and altered key parts of the essay. While a few of the changes simply shorten the piece or cut passages that might not be as interesting to Chinese readers, most of the deletions and changes eliminate or blunt criticism of China, altering the tone of the essay. The Global Times also removed all of the links th..

Hong Kong photographer Billy H.C. Kwok was eight years old when the United Kingdom handed over control of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Growing up, Kwok witnessed British influence wane and China’s control grow. He has also watched the freedoms promised to Hong Kong under the principle of “One Country, Two Systems” ground down before his eyes, “at first slowly and now all at once,” as he wrote for The Nation in the summer of 2020.

Like other authors of recent Western histories of this period, Dikötter attributes most of the early initiative in the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing to the Chinese, not to Nixon. Beijing’s preoccupation with Moscow did not fade quickly, either. Dikötter quotes one senior Chinese foreign policy official who said of the Soviets in 1977, “They are more imperialist than the worst imperialists.” As this view helps illustrate, the story of China in the post-Mao period—which came to be known as the era of reform and opening after long stretches of autarky and violent upheaval brought about by experiments varyingly aimed at producing socioeconomic egalit..