ZGBriefs from 2015
The Resource Library is where you will find the latest resources from across our publications.
ZGBriefs | August 6, 2015
Why choice of Beijing to host 2022 Winter Olympics worries even IOC (+video) (July 31, 2015, Christian Science Monitor)
When Oslo, Norway, and Krakow, Poland, and Stockholm all pull out of the bidding for reasons similar to Boston's; when voters in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Munich reject proposed Olympic bids for reasons similar to Boston's; and when no one in North America bothers to apply, you end up with – Beijing.
ZGBriefs | July 30, 2015
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.
ZGBriefs | July 23, 2015
Married Without Children in China: Dealing With the Pressure in a Baby-Centric Country (July 21, 2015, China Real Time)
In China, “Are you married?” and “Do you have children?” can be the equivalent of asking, “How are you?” An American who met my husband while working at an Internet company in China, I never cared what his family said about us when we lived in the U.S. – oceans and time zones away. But since we moved back to China in 2013, I have gradually collected all these “reminders” until they accumulated painfully in my mind.
ZGBriefs | July 16, 2015
China Fences In Its Nomads, and an Ancient Life With (July 11, 2015, The New York Times)
In what amounts to one of the most ambitious attempts made at social engineering, the Chinese government is in the final stages of a 15-year-old campaign to settle the millions of pastoralists who once roamed China’s vast borderlands. By year’s end, Beijing claims it will have moved the remaining 1.2 million herders into towns that provide access to schools, electricity and modern health care.
ZGBriefs | July 9, 2015
The really worrying financial crisis is happening in China, not Greece (July 7, 2015, The Telegraph)
While all Western eyes remain firmly focused on Greece, a potentially much more significant financial crisis is developing on the other side of world. In some quarters, it’s already being called China’s 1929 – the year of the most infamous stock market crash in history and the start of the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression.
ZGBriefs | July 2, 2015
Has China’s ‘One Country, Two Systems’ Experiment Failed? (June 17, 2015, China File)
The ideal scenario for Beijing is that it could establish full, total control of Hong Kong while maintaining the façade of its autonomy. But the Occupy movement and the ever more militant and local nationalist resistance is making this façade difficult to uphold.
ZGBriefs | June 25, 2015
The village and the girl (June 24, 2015, BBC)
She spent her childhood working in the fields, feeding the family’s pigs. The destruction of rural China became for Xiao Zhang a liberation - and an opportunity. This is the story of how her life changed as much as her country.
ZGBriefs | June 18, 2015
Does Xi Jinping Represent a Return to the Mao Era? (June 16, 2015, China File)
Following is an edited transcript of a live event hosted at Asia Society New York on May 21, 2015, “ChinaFile Presents: Does Xi Jinping Represent a Return to the Politics of the Mao Era?” The evening convened the scholars Roderick MacFarquhar and Andrew Walder—the publication of whose new book on Mao Zedong was the occasion for the event—with diplomat Susan Shirk and Orville Schell, ChinaFile’s publisher and the Arthur Ross Director for the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society.
ZGBriefs | June 11, 2015
Mao As Church Father (June 1, 2015, First Things)
In a brief review of recent Asian Church history (From Every Tribe and Nation), Mark Noll makes the arresting comment that “Mao Zedong counts as one of the most significant figures in modern church history.” Noll hastens to add this was not Mao's intention; rather, it is “because of what happened inadvertently through his actions.”
ZGBriefs | June 4, 2015
Scenes From China's Yangtze River Disaster (June 2, 2015, The Atlantic)
A passenger ship named Dongfangzhixing (Eastern Star) carrying 458 people, including 406 Chinese passengers, 5 travel agency workers and 47 crew members, sank on Monday night in the Jianli section of the Yangtze River in China. According to officials 15 people have been rescued with hundreds still missing. The captain and the chief engineer both survived and claimed that the ship sank quickly after being caught in a cyclone. Rescuers fought bad weather on Tuesday as they searched for the missing, many of them elderly Chinese tourists, in one of China's worst shipping disasters in decades.