ZGBriefs

ZGBriefs | July 30, 2015

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ZGBriefs is a compilation of news items gathered from published online sources. ChinaSource is not responsible for the content, and inclusion in ZGBriefs does not equal endorsement.

Featured Article

Not ‘Leftover Women’ but ‘Leftover Men’ Are China’s Real Problem (July 29, 2015, What’s on Weibo)
China’s single young women have been put in the spotlight by Chinese media for years. But according to the state-run Xinhua News, it is not the women, but the single men that are China’s real problem.

Government / Politics / Foreign Affairs

Ai Weiwei’s Freedom by Fiat (July 23, 2015, The New Yorker)
Curiously, the way in which Ai Weiwei’s freedom was restored—arbitrarily, unannounced, with no formal proceedings—embodies the very force that he has criticized for nearly a decade: the rule of man over the rule of law.

Trial of Chinese Rights Campaigners on Subversion Charges Continues (July 24, 2015, The New York Times)
The trial of three prominent rights campaigners, including a lawyer, on charges of inciting subversion continued on Friday in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, amid a sweeping crackdown on human rights lawyers that has drawn international condemnation. The proceedings against the three, Tang Jingling, Yuan Xinting and Wang Qingying, resumed on Thursday after a monthlong halt and continued on Friday.

China Tiananmen dissident Wuer Kaixi bids for Taiwan seat (July 24, 2015, BBC)
A Chinese democracy activist who was among the leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has announced he will run for a seat in Taiwan's parliament. Wuer Kaixi, who fled China after the protests, pledged to fight for human rights and justice in his adopted home. He pledged to take a tougher approach to Taiwan's relations with mainland China, from which the island split in 1949, at the end of the civil war. Mr Wuer, 47, is standing as an independent candidate.

U.S. Fears Data Stolen by Chinese Hacker Could Identify Spies (July 24, 2015, The New York Times)
American officials are concerned that the Chinese government could use the stolen records of millions of federal workers and contractors to piece together the identities of intelligence officers secretly posted in China over the years. 

China’s Global Ambitions, With Loans and Strings Attached (July 24, 2015, The New York Times)
The country has invested billions in Ecuador and elsewhere, using its economic clout to win diplomatic allies and secure natural resources around the world.

China Uses ‘Picking Quarrels’ Charge to Cast a Wider Net Online (July 26, 2015, The New York Times)
Artists, essayists, lawyers, bloggers and others deemed to be online troublemakers have been hauled into police stations and investigated or imprisoned for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge that was once confined to physical activities like handing out fliers or organizing protests.

Taiwan president rues lack of progress with China (July 27, 2015, BBC)
The president of Taiwan has said that political progress in mainland China is unstable. Speaking in a rare interview with the BBC, Ma Ying-jeou said he was disappointed that despite improvements in the economic relationship during his two terms as president, there had been no meeting between himself and President Xi Jinping of China.

What’s behind Beijing’s drive to control the South China Sea? (July 28, 2015, The Guardian)
There is no single explanation for why asserting its authority over the South China Sea now matters so much to China. Controlling the many tiny islands is in part a matter of controlling of the wealth assumed to lay beneath the sea in the form of unexploited minerals and oil and gas, not to mention the immense fisheries that exist in these waters.

Ethnic Tensions in Xinjiang Complicate China-Turkey Ties (July 28, 2015, The New York Times)
Turkey, heir to the Ottoman Empire, has long seen itself as a protector of Turkic-speaking people across the arc of Central Asia — and that includes the mostly Muslim Uighurs in China’s western region of Xinjiang, where ethnic tensions and outbursts of violence between Uighurs and ethnic Han, the dominant group in China, have been rising because of what Uighurs say is official repression, though Chinese officials blame terrorist ideology.

Q. and A.: Christopher K. Johnson on the Heavy Thumb of Xi Jinping (July 28, 2015, Sinosphere)
How thoroughly has Xi Jinping rewritten the rules of Chinese politics? Since he became Communist Party leader in November 2012 and the country’s president in March 2013, he has pursued an energetic agenda at home and abroad. But experts disagree on just how powerful, and transformative, Mr. Xi is.

China conducts South China Sea live drill 'to improve at-sea combat ability' (July 28, 2015, The Guardian)
China’s navy has carried out a “live firing drill” in the South China Sea to improve its maritime combat ability, state media has reported as tensions flare over the disputed waters. The exercise on Tuesday involved at least 100 naval vessels, dozens of aircraft, missile launch battalions of the Second Artillery Corps and information warfare troops, Xinhua news agency said, citing navy sources.

Beijing's political capital greatest casualty of market implosion (July 28, 2015, Sydney Morning Herald)
The most worrying thing about this ongoing collision of political control and market economics is that while we've seen both forces do serious damage to the other, it's possible that neither of them will win.

China’s New NGO Legislation: A Blessing or Curse for Foreign NGOs? (July 29, 2015, China Briefing)
Although the current draft has expanded foreign NGO freedom by eliminating GSEs from the registration process, the law also includes several complicated stipulations that a foreign NGO must carefully abide by so as to not expose itself to legal liability.

Religion

China cracks down on Hong Kong evangelists (July 22, 2015, BBC)
Few things frighten Philip Woo, a pastor and missionary based in Hong Kong. The Lutheran has been spreading his faith among underground churches in mainland China for 25 years. But since 2013, he has also been engaging in a supposedly less risky activity: organising religious training for Chinese church leaders in the former British colony. For that, he was summoned to the religious affairs bureau of a district in the southern city of Shenzhen on 1 July, the same day that China enacted a sweeping national security law.

Render unto Caesar (July 25, 2015, The Economist)
With official churches less compliant and house churches more ready to talk, the lines are more blurred than ever. The party seems to be groping around with a stick in one hand and a carrot in the other, looking for ways to bully and coax Christians into serving its ends.

China jails nine more members of banned cult: Xinhua (July 26, 2015, Reuters)
A court in the central Chinese province of Hubei has jailed nine members of a banned religious cult for up to three years, state news agency Xinhua said on Sunday, a day after five others were sentenced in a northeastern province.

Young People in China (July 27, 2015, From the West Courtyard)
These stories actually prompt deeper questions about what life is like for youth in China today. What are Chinese youth like? What are the issues they wrestle with? How are they coping with the pressures of life? Are they really interested in spiritual matters?

China's Christians protest 'evil' Communist campaign to tear down crosses (July 27, 2015, The Guardian)
Christian leaders – including an 89-year-old bishop – have taken to the streets of eastern China to protest against an “evil” campaign to remove crosses that many see as a coordinated Communist party attack on their faith. Activists say more than 1,200 crosses have been stripped from churches in Zhejiang province since the government initiative began in late 2013. There has been a spike in such actions in recent weeks.

Chinese Christians make crosses at home as church crosses are removed by gov’t (July 27, 2015, Hong Kong Free Press)
Christians in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province have launched a cross making and wearing campaign amid a year-long “clean-up movement” by the local government to remove exterior church crosses.

1 Way To Pray For China This Week (July 27, 2015, China Partnership)
As China’s house church continues to grow, it also continues to diversify. As with any advance of the gospel, Chinese Christians are struggling with questions concerning Biblical interpretation, historic theology, indigenous theology, and church polity. These are just a few large categories of issues that the Chinese house church is now working through. As you can imagine, there is a plethora of topics within each category that must be contextualized for Chinese culture.

Stewarding the Environment: China’s Energy Future (July 29, 2015, From the West Courtyard)
The very real needs for energy, water and other resources, and the concomitant impact of urbanization upon the environment, have far-reaching domestic and international implications. China’s Christians share these concerns as they grapple with the question of what it means to be responsible stewards of creation in an era when food and water security are among the most critical global issues.

Crackdown on Christianity in China, but for what purpose? (July 29, 2015, UCA News)
But in China, it is always important to recognize that any crackdowns should be seen through the prism of the broader policy context, as crackdowns across the country are many and deep. The reality prompts the question: what is the party's endgame here? Renewal or just survival?

Christians respond to demolitions in Zhejiang with a ‘Make and carry the cross" campaign (July 28, 2015, Asia News)
Catholics and Protestants in the eastern province of Zhejiang have launched an ‘ecumenical’ campaign to make crosses – the Christian symbol par excellence – and carry them everywhere. Launched on social media, the idea of disobeying in a legal and peaceful manner has met with great success. It is a response to a “clean-up” policy undertaken by local authorities against churches and crosses, ostensibly because Christians failed to respect building regulations.

Official says church crosses merely relocated, denies restricting freedom of worship (July 29, 2015, Global Times)
Authorities in Wenzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province have denied demolishing the crosses on churches, saying they have merely "relocated" the crosses out of safety concerns. An anonymous official from Wenzhou's ethnic and religious affairs bureau told the Global Times that the authorities are "relocating" the cross from the top of the church to its façade and indoors for the sake of safety and beauty.

China's crusade to remove crosses from churches 'is for safety concerns' (July 29, 2015, The Guardian)
A Communist party campaign during which crosses have been stripped from the roofs of more than 1,200 Chinese churches is being conducted “for the sake of safety and beauty”, a government official has claimed.

Uncertain times fuel occult beliefs in China's Party hierarchy (July 29, 2015, Reuters)
Underground belief in occult practices such as sorcery and prophecy has spread widely enough amongst Party officials that state media have felt compelled to issue numerous warnings in recent years about its dangers. "Fake masters and false miracle workers have reached in the highest levels," the Guangming Daily, an official party national, warned in late 2013. The party also fears pronouncements from sages either forecasting its demise or spreading panic among the public with predictions of disaster. 

Society / Life

There are 668 million internet users in China, and almost all of them are using smartphones (July 23, 2015, South China Morning Post)
While China's saturated smartphone market may be slowing down for manufacturers, it is changing the way people in the world's second largest economy get online for good. According to a new report by the official China Internet Network Information Centre, the number of internet users in China rose to 668 million by the end of June, up 2.91 per cent, or 18.94 million, compared to the end of 2014.

Shanghai's European-style ghost towns – in pictures (July 23, 2015, The Guardian)
Just a decade after six European-style towns were built to absorb Shanghai’s increasing population, China’s slowing economy has left them mostly deserted. James Bollen’s images record the failure of these empty copycat boroughs.

Man arrested in China for trying to light fire on plane (July 26, 2015, The Guardian)
A man who attempted to light a fire on board a Chinese plane has been arrested after being restrained by passengers and crew members. The attempted arson occurred at around 1am Sunday aboard a Shenzhen Airlines flight from Taizhou, Zhejiang province, to Guangzhou, Guangdong province, the Chinese civil aviation administration said.

From One-Child Policy to Two-Child Policy: Weibo Responds (July 27, 2015, What’s on Weibo)
The expected changes in China’s one-child policy have created a buzz on social media and society at large. Although many netizens applaud the news that Chinese parents can soon have two children, some are more pessimistic. “The two-child policy comes too late,” some experts say.

A City the Size of Kansas (July 27, 2015, Outside-In)
Here’s a question — is there a limit to how large a city can be and still be considered a city (as opposed to a province/state or region)?

Dark corner of China's rise: A surge in trafficking of children (July 27, 2015, Christian Science Monitor)
Some 250 million Chinese who work in distant industrial cities often entrust their children to relatives. Child traffickers have exploited their vulnerability, leading to calls for further reform of China's rigid household residency system. 

Not ‘Leftover Women’ but ‘Leftover Men’ Are China’s Real Problem (July 29, 2015, What’s on Weibo)
China’s single young women have been put in the spotlight by Chinese media for years. But according to the state-run Xinhua News, it is not the women, but the single men that are China’s real problem.

China mall blamed for woman's death in escalator (July 29, 2015, BBC)
A Chinese shopping mall and the manufacturers of one of its escalators were to blame for the death of a young mother, investigators say. The woman narrowly managed to push her son to safety before she fell into the still moving escalator on Sunday. Investigators concluded that store staff lacked training and should have shut the machinery down earlier. The incident in Jingzhou, in Hubei province, has sparked widespread anger at the department store.

Health / Environment

China’s unspeakable consensus (July 28, 2015, China Media Project)
In fact, to a great extent the Three Gorges Dam is the most apt metaphor for China’s political system. The project is a product of systemic logic of the Chinese political system. It is a logic of supreme human dominance, in which nature exists only to be mastered by the directed wills of men. Put another way, the Chinese system is itself a kind of political Three Gorges Dam.

Ian Parry scholarship winner Yuyang Liu documents the dire reality of mental disease in China (July 29, 2015, TIME)
To live with mental illness in China is to live in an invisible world. Of the more than 100 million victims living with some form of mental illness in China, 16 percent are classified as severe, according to a 2009 report by China’s National Center for Mental Health. Yet, inadequate psychiatric care and social stigmas have pushed many out of the public sphere, denying family members the much-needed support they need.

China: As water demands grow sharply, supply is shrinking (July 29, 2015, Christian Science Monitor)
China has 20 percent of the world's population, and 7 percent of its fresh water. As pressure mounts, officials are pushing conservation reforms such as reforestation and water taxes – and diverting water from the south to the north. 

Economics / Trade / Business

China’s Market Plunge: The Numbers (July 27, 2015, Wall Street Journal)
China stocks on Monday suffered their sharpest one-day percentage decline since 2007 as worries mounted that authorities are pulling back measures to prop up the market.

China's Stock Market Unnerves Investors With Another Nosedive (July 28, 2015, NPR)
Let's ask what's really happening in China. That country's stock market has unnerved investors with yet another plunge. On Monday, prices on China's biggest exchange fell 8.5 percent in a single day. Today, shares opened down again. All this follows a big drop in June and a failed government effort to prop up the market.

Apple 'fake factory' raided in China (July 28, 2015, BBC)
A factory which allegedly made up to 41,000 fake Apple iPhones has been raided in China, with nine arrests. The operation reportedly involved "hundreds" of workers repackaging second hand smartphone parts as new iPhones for export, with counterfeit phones produced worth 120m yuan ($19m).

A Face palm in the Effort to Blame ‘Foreign Forces’ for China Stock Turmoil (July 29, 2015, China Real Time)
China’s stock regulators are searching for “malicious” forces behind the steep sell-off in the nation’s stock market, and some people — like the head of state-run aerospace powerhouse China Aviation Industry Corp. — suggest their gaze should be focused abroad. Lin Zuoming, an alternate member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee and president of AVIC, took up that theme last week, saying in an essay published in the nationalistic state-run tabloid Global Times that the turmoil, which sent stocks swooning in late June and early July, was linked to a scheme by foreign forces.

Science / Technology

China Will Soon Leapfrog Traditional Leaders in Nuclear Power (July 27, 2015, MIT Technology Review)
China generates only about 2 percent of its total electricity using nuclear power, but it is adding new reactors much faster than any other country.

Arts / Entertainment / Media

Why Taylor Swift’s 1989 Merchandise Is Not Going to Get Her Banned in China (July 23, 2015, China File)
But for now, Chinese authorities are unlikely to deem Swift’s music and clothing line political statements—because they are not, in fact, political. And the ability to distinguish that is well within China’s own stated best interest.

China’s Reality Shows Must Uphold ‘Socialist Core Values,’ Regulator Says (July 23, 2015, China Real Time)
China’s reality shows should “blend in socialist core values” and not become “a place to show off wealth and rely on celebrities,” said a circular released Wednesday by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, the country’s top media regulator. The circular added that shows should follow the country’s austerity push by relying on a modest production budget and should not “deliberately flare up conflicts” or “reflect the evil of human nature” in order to draw eyeballs.

Why China has fallen in love with a baby radish monster (July 27, 2015, BBC)
Huba, cat-sized, resembling a radish with four arms and pointy ears, is the star of China's biggest local film to date. The green-haired creature is the main character of Monster Hunt, which has swept the box office since it opened on 16 June. The plot is, well, unconventional and yet it has collected more than 1.317bn yuan ($212m, £137m) to date. The BBC's Tessa Wong explains why.

Beijing launches final pitch for 2022 Winter Games (July 27, 2015, Business Insider)
Beijing Olympic officials on Monday shrugged off questions over snow levels and spread-out venues in their 2022 Winter Games bid as they launched their final pitch in Malaysia ahead of an IOC vote this week. The hosting of the 2022 Games is a two-horse race between Beijing and Almaty in Kazakhstan, with the winner decided Friday in a secret International Olympic Committee ballot in Kuala Lumpur.

Travel / Food

Video: Nanjing! (July 24, 2015, From the West Courtyard)

Southeast Asia Loses Out As Chinese Tourists Seek New Pastures (July 27, 2015, Jing Daily)
Encouraged by the rising tide of Chinese outbound tourists engulfing Thailand, South Korea, and Japan, Southeast Asian nations have spent heavily to attract what has become the world’s largest-spending outbound tourist bloc. However, with Chinese tourist flows to countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines drying up, Southeast Asia is finding that putting its eggs all in the China basket may not have been the most sustainable strategy.

Harbin latest city to offer 72-hour visa-free entry (July 28, 2015, Want China Times)
Harbin in China's frigid northeast will offer 72-hour visa-free entry for international transit passengers from Aug. 1 in a move to boost tourism and business. The policy covers travelers from 51 countries and regions, including the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Japan. They can enjoy a 72-hour stay in the city upon entry via the Harbin Taiping International Airport, providing they have the visas and onward tickets to leave for a third country or region within 72 hours.

Language / Language Learning

Think before you write (May 15, 2015, Skritter)
The more actively you process the language you're studying, the more you learn. If your learning is automatic and passive, what you study is less likely to stick.

Books

Urbanizing China in War and Peace: The Case of Wuxi County, by Toby Lincoln (Amazon)

Articles for Researchers

The Rising Anti-Intellectualism in China: Part I (July 29, 2015, Asia Unbound)
Defined as hostility towards intellectuals and intellectual pursuits, anti-intellectualism represents an attitude, not a theory or school of thought, in social-political lives. A look at Hua’s career path and his writings reveal his fundamental antipathy toward intellect and intellectuals.

Events

The China Symposium (Corban University)
Thursday, Oct. 1, 7:00 p.m., Psalm Performing Arts Center
The Symposium also includes these events.
Wednesday, Sept. 30, 10:00 a.m., Psalm Performing Arts Center
Wednesday, Sept. 30, 11:15 a.m. Dining Hall (hosted lunch for missions leaders like you)
Friday, Oct. 2, 10:00 a.m., Psalm Performing Arts Center
RSVP required

Image credit: Sanlitun Nite, by Ding Zhou, via Flickr

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Joann Pittman

Joann Pittman

Joann Pittman is Vice President of Partnership and China Engagement and editor of ZGBriefs. Prior to joining ChinaSource, Joann spent 28 years working in China, as an English teacher, language student, program director, and cross-cultural trainer for organizations and businesses engaged in China. She has also taught Chinese at the University …View Full Bio