A weekly roundup of news and analysis to help you follow key developments in China and the Chinese church.
Featured Article
Video: A Portrait of Youth and Camaraderie in China (April 5, 2016, The Atlantic)
Xiong Di, this short film by Enric Ribes and Oriol Martínez, is also the Chinese word for “fellas.” It’s a beautiful ode to friendship among young factory workers in China, with themes of love and fresh-faced ambition.
Featured Article
Inside A Chinese Self-Help Group (April 1, 2016, Roads and Kingdoms)
I found my self-help group through an Uber driver. In China, the car service’s drivers are often part-timers who have other occupations—hotel managers, entrepreneurs, housewives—each with his or her own reason for driving, but with the common desire of “going out and learning.”
Featured Article
The Swept Tomb vs. The Empty Tomb: A Collision of Holidays in China (March 30, 2016, The Gospel Coalition)
Each spring almost one-fifth of the world’s population observes a tomb-oriented holiday that isn’t Easter. Yet despite the mass observance of this festival, most Christians in the West are unfamiliar with it. The holiday is China’s Qingming Jie (pronounced along the lines of “ching ming jieh,” henceforth QMJ). As a Westerner who pastors in China, I’d like to tell you what it is and why you should care.
Featured Article
The Long March From China To The Ivies (April/May 2016, The Economist)
It is one of China’s curious contradictions that, even as the government tries to eradicate foreign influences from the country’s universities, the flood of Chinese students leaving for the West continues to rise. Over the past decade, the number of Mainland Chinese students enrolled in American colleges and universities has nearly quintupled, from 62,523 in 2005 to 304,040 last year, according to the Institute of International Education.
Featured Article
A short documentary: The end of the Chinese miracle (March 9, 2016, Financial Times)
China's economic miracle is under threat from a slowing economy and a dwindling labour force. The FT investigates how the world's most populous country has reached a critical new chapter in its history. Jamil Anderlini narrates.
Featured Article
The business of censorship: Documents show how Weibo filters sensitive news in China (March 3, 2016, Committee to Protect Journalists)
A set of documents provided to CPJ by a former employee in Weibo's censorship department however, sheds light on how the site must tread a fine line between appeasing government censors and encouraging users to keep posting to its site.
Featured Article
Death and Despair in China's Rustbelt (March 1, 2016, Bloomberg)
This is the city of Tonghua in China’s rustbelt, where a desperate handful of steelworkers has gathered each week outside the management office of their mill in freezing temperatures to demand months of wages they say they’re owed. The answer, according to interviews with workers and residents, is always the same: there is no money.
Featured Article
The Golden Generation: Why China’s super-rich send their children abroad (February 22, 2016, The New Yorker)
The children of wealthy Chinese are known as fuerdai, which means “rich second generation.” In a culture where poverty and thrift were long the norm, their extravagances have become notorious.
Featured Article
Leave China, Study in America, Find Jesus (February 11, 2016, Foreign Policy)
One day in early September, as frigid weather moved into Madison, a group of students approached Cai in her dormitory hallway to ask her opinion about God. She realized that she had never thought about it before. Out of simple curiosity, she began to attend a Bible study group. And so her spiritual journey began; four years after coming to Wisconsin, Cai was baptized and then tied the knot with an American in a Madison church
Featured Article
China Says Its Students, Even Those Abroad, Need More ‘Patriotic Education’ (February 10, 2016, The New York Times)
Chinese students, already immersed in classes and textbooks that promote nationalist loyalty to the Communist Party as a bedrock value, must be made even more patriotic and devoted to the party, even when they are studying in universities abroad, according to a new directive sent to education officials.
Featured Article
Light government touch lets China’s Hui practice Islam in the open (February 1, 2016, The New York Times)
Throughout Ningxia and the adjacent Gansu Province, new filigreed mosques soar over even the smallest villages, adolescent boys and girls spend their days studying the Quran at religious schools, and muezzin summon the faithful via loudspeakers — a marked contrast to mosques in Xinjiang, where the local authorities often forbid amplified calls to prayer.
Featured Article
China’s Search for the Secrets of Jewish Success (January 25, 2016, Tablet)
In their quest to understand Jews better, popular Chinese authors and bloggers offer up facts and myths about everything from the Talmud to anti-Semitism.