Featured Article
Where Wisdom Meets Faith (August 18, 2025, ChinaSource Journal)
This new ChinaSource Journal (CSJ) issue focusing on AI comes at an important time, where the practical benefits of AI are being weighed against important ethical and theological issues that come with every new technology.
Government / Politics / Foreign Affairs
China’s Crackdown on Lavish Civil Servant Perks Will ‘Harm’ the Economy, Experts Warn (August 12, 2025, The Guardian)
Adjacent to a municipal government building in Beijing, a normally bustling restaurant is now eerily quiet, at lunchtime most of its seats are empty. The recent crackdown on civil servants frequenting restaurants – part of a government austerity drive intended to crack down on corruption – has likely affected business and caused liquor sales to plummet, admits one waitress who works in the opulent establishment.
Video – How Did China’s Military Become So Strong? (August 15, 2025, National Committee On U.S.-China Relations)
There is no escaping the reality that military tension is a core feature of the U.S.-China relationship. In the past 30 years, China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), pursued a rapid modernization plan, establishing itself as a near pure competitor of U.S. and its allied forces in the region. Why did the PLA grow so quickly, and how do U.S. and Chinese strategists navigate the new balance of power in the Asia-Pacific?
Religion
Wenzhou: We Need to Apply the Gospel (August 14, 2025, China Partnership)
Although Wenzhou has more per-capita Christians than any other Chinese city, that does not mean ministry in this eastern Chinese city is easy. Today, a local pastor talks about the difficulties he faces sharing with non-Christians, encouraging believers, and trying to equip his people to persevere through a challenging era. He says, to survive this season, Christians need to go deeper in their understanding of the gospel, and learn to apply it practically.
International ‘Amity Cup’ Ping Pong Tournament to Be Held in Nanjing Again (August 17, 2025, China Christian Daily)
Since its launch in 2018, the Amity Cup has grown into a signature event combining sport and philanthropy. Over the past five tournaments, it has drawn nearly 4,000 participants nationwide and raised close to seven million yuan, supporting projects in poverty alleviation, student aid, elderly care, and assistance for people with disabilities.
The Digitalized Image of God and Corrupted Human Nature (August 18, 2025, ChinaSource)
Recent studies on Christian theology and AI have looked into risks arising from the extensive application of AI, mindful of its favorable consequences within human life. For example, Eric Stoddart helpfully reminds us that AI-enhanced caregiving practices should not undermine human responsibilities to pastoral care while recognizing value in AI systems
The Bible and Chinese Culture (August 18, 2025, China Partnership)
Sometimes Chinese people dismiss the Bible. They do this precisely because we, as believers, too often make the leap directly from a biblical text to practical application in today’s world. We don’t give enough space to buffer and truly transition from one to the other. We just make the turn – and it’s often like a right angle, a very rigid and abrupt jump. As we try to transition between the sacred text and the reality of today, we are missing the background understanding – the classical, canonical, and historical transition that shows how we arrived at this position.
Challenges and Opportunities for the Chinese Mission Movement (August 19, 2025, ChinaSource)
Tan (pseudonym) is a cross-cultural missionary, serving God in a place far from her home in China. She’s spent the past several years living in a foreign country, experiencing the joys and challenges of cross-cultural living. But before Tan moved abroad, she was serving God within mainland China. Tan recalls what she herself experienced several years ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic: “Lots of missionaries have left. The internationals had to leave, but then the Chinese staff were left alone.”
Society / Life
Translation: Filmmaker Describes Monitoring by Local Cadre in Urumqi (August 13, 2025, China Digital Times)
Recently, Guo posted about the intrusive monitoring he had been subjected to by local cadres after renting an apartment in Urumqi, and recounted the police visit that marked the start of the “unauthorized filmmaking” case. Further details, he suggested, will follow. Italicised text in the translation represents the content of screenshots from Guo’s WeChat messages with the cadre assigned to monitor his whereabouts—the original images can be seen at CDT Chinese.
China Claims to Want Women to Have Children and a Career (August 14, 2025, The Economist)
When Ms. Wang returned to work at a Chinese internet giant after having a baby, her boss pulled her aside. She told her she’d be less invested in her work because the country’s breastfeeding policy would allow her to leave one hour earlier. “I’ll be a normal colleague, not a breastfeeding mother,” she replied, staying past 10pm regularly like the rest. Based in Beijing, she was entitled legally to 158 days of maternity leave. But she received the worst performance rating in her team last year because others had to cover her work while she was away. She was fired in April.
The Rising Online Movement for Smoke-Free Public Spaces in China (August 14, 2025, What’s on Weibo)
Anti-smoking activism, especially by foreigners, has recently drawn attention on Chinese social media. A renewed online push to stop smoking in no-smoking areas highlights broader challenges of enforcing public smoking bans in a country where smoking remains prevalent.
How China’s Urban Youth Became Obsessed With Birding (August 15, 2025, Sixth Tone)
A year ago, Wang Zexian would never have expected to spend his commute observing birds. But in late 2024, while photographing along Shanghai’s Huangpu River, he unexpectedly captured an egret and a Siberian gull in his lens. This chance encounter ignited a passion for birdwatching and opened his eyes to the diverse bird species thriving in the urban environment.
The Other Olympics: Four Standouts at the Chengdu’s World Games (August 19, 2025, The World of Chinese)
On the night of August 17, The World Games drew to a close with a blaze of attention both on the field and online. Over 11 days in Chengdu, a record 220,000 visitors witnessed 256 events across 34 sports, ranging from traditional competitions like dragon boat racing to emerging games like ultimate flying discs. Held every four years like the Olympics, the World Games, often dubbed the “Olympics of non-Olympic sports (非奥项目的奥运会),” has long served as a testing ground for future Olympic disciplines.
Economics / Trade / Business
How Scared Should You Be of “The China Squeeze”? (August 12, 2025, The Economist)
After months of tit-for-tat tariffs, the Sino-American trade war has settled into uneasy stasis. But China is using the time to hone a sophisticated arsenal of economic weapons. Even as the sides contemplate a broader deal to stabilize the planet’s most important trading relationship—worth $659 billion each year—China knows that its power is not in what it buys, but in what it sells. (subscription required)
China’s Youth Unemployment Hits 11-Month High as Army of Graduates Joins Job Hunt (August 19, 2025, South China Morning Post)
China’s youth unemployment rate rose to its highest level in 11 months in July, as a record number of graduates enter an already shaky labour market. The urban jobless rate for the 16-24 age group, excluding students, rose to 17.8 per cent last month from 14.5 per cent in June, putting an end to four straight months of decline and marking the metric’s highest level since last August, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday.
Science / Technology
How China Is Making Gains in the Race for AI Dominance (August 12, 2025, Christian Science Monitor)
China is producing increasingly cutting-edge large language models – programs trained on huge amounts of data to recognize text and perform tasks – and spreading free, open-source models around the world. It is on track to achieve its goal of an AI industry worth $100 billion by 2030.
Box, Run, Crash: China’s Humanoid Robot Games Show Advances and Limitations (August 15, 2025, The Guardian)
The kickboxers, pint-sized humanoid robots entered by teams from leading Chinese technological universities, are part of a jamboree of humanoid events taking place at China’s latest technology event. After spectators in the 12,000-seater National Speed Skating Oval, built for the 2022 Winter Olympics, stood for the Chinese national anthem on Friday morning, the government-backed games began.
Empowering the Church with Code (August 18, 2025, ChinaSource)
My faith journey is another long story. I was a typical atheist, opposed to all religion, viewing it as a crutch for the mind. But everything changed when I encountered the Bible. I took it seriously—evaluating whether these things actually happened or whether it was all a hoax. In a sense, I used my scientific mind to assess what is true. That’s how I came to the gateway of faith.
China’s Latest Conservation Weapon Is a Robot Antelope (August 18, 2025, Sixth Tone)
In a remote corner of the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, a new four-legged species has quietly joined the ranks of Tibetan antelope on the Hoh Xil National Nature Reserve — mingling with the wild herds, and their new summer calves, without so much as a glance from its adopted family. But unlike them, this “animal” isn’t here to graze or give birth — its only need is the occasional change of battery.
Education
Classrooms Beneath the Himalayas: Why China’s “Migrant Learners” Are Turning to Nepal (August 13, 2025, The World of Chinese)
“Chinese students have flooded in—they now make up around 70 percent of our total enrollment,” Row tells TWOC. “It started to increase from the beginning of the year, but the real surge has come in the past four months.” According to Row, the institute recently added a fourth classroom and expanded its teaching staff to meet demand.
Travel / Food
New Capital Airport Services Target International Travelers (August 15, 2025, The Beijinger Blog)
The official WeChat account of Beijing Capital International Airport (BCIA, aka PEK) recently published a list of 16 service measures across five major categories that have been or will be undertaken to improve Beijing’s standing as a destination for inbound tourism.
Beyond Chow Mein: Can a New Wave of Restaurants Help China Win Hearts? (August 16, 2025, BBC)
Chinese food is having a moment outside China, driven by huge success and intense competition back home. And nowhere is this clearer than in Singapore, where ethnically Chinese people make up more than three-quarters of the multicultural population.
A Matcha Made in China: The Lost Origins of Today’s Trendiest Tea (August 19, 2025, Sixth Tone)
While tea drinkers in the West might just drop a tea bag into boiled water and think nothing more of it, Chinese tea aficionados have elaborate preferences for how to pour water of what temperature over which quantity of what kind of leaves — preferences that are steeped in a rich Chinese history of tea drinking that goes back thousands of years. Nevertheless, some parts of this history even Chinese people have forgotten.
Arts Entertainment / Media
Chatbots Silent on Sichuan Protests (August 15, 2025, China Media Project)
Earlier this month, residents of Jiangyou, a city in the mountains of China’s Sichuan province, were met with violence from local police as they massed to protest the inadequate official response to an unspeakable act of violence — a brutal case of teenage bullying filmed and posted online. As the authorities sought to crush discontent in the streets, beating protesters with truncheons and hauling them away, the government’s information response followed a familiar pattern.
Chinese Literature Is Tough to Find in English. One Editor Hopes to Change That (August 18, 2025, NPR)
A nanny for a wealthy family plots to kidnap the child in her care. Unfortunately, her plans go off the rails when the family patriarch gets arrested on corruption charges. It’s a premise to a novel that could take place in Washington, D.C. or Manhattan, but in the tale Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, it takes place in Beijing.
Language / Language Learning
Classroom Mandarin: Essential expressions for learning Chinese in Chinese (August 18, 2025, Hacking Chinese)
As a student, your first priority should be to learn the most useful words and phrases. Interestingly, the most useful words are not the most common ones in the language as a whole, nor those taught in your textbook beyond the first few chapters (you do need basic pronouns and verbs, after all).
Pray for China
August 16 (Pray For China: A Walk Through History)
On Aug. 16, 2005, house church pastor Allen Yuan Xiangchen (袁相忱牧师) went to be with the Lord at age 91 in Beijing. Pastor Yuan was arrested in 1958 and sentenced to life in prison for “counter-revolutionary crimes.” His wife, Liang Huizhen, (梁惠珍师母) struggled mightily to raise their six children while he lived in harsh conditions in frigid Heilongjiang. After his release, he resumed pastoral ministry, e.g. baptizing over 350 people in a factory swimming pool in 1998. Pray for Christians in Beijing and Heilongjiang to be aware of Satan’s attacks and to be prayer warriors for their family, friends, and neighbors. After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves. And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord had told them, and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer. Job 42:7-9
Fuzhou: How to Pray (July 28, 2025, China Partnership)
Jason Mandryk on Intercessory Prayer (June 29, 2025, ChinaSource)
Operation World (April 21, 2025, ChinaSource)
Pray for China (prayforchina.us)
Pray for China (China Partnership)