ZGBriefs | July 12, 2018

Featured Article

Love in an Old Climate (July 7, 2018, The World of Chinese)
The first character in the Chinese for “companion,” banlü (伴侣), literally means “person-halves.” When my grandfather is first diagnosed with cancer, my grandmother teaches me about banlü and what it means—and also how it is to love someone who’s old and sick in a country with a struggling hospital system.

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Government / Politics / Foreign Affairs

‘It is about Xi as the leader of the world’: Former detainees recount abuse in Chinese re-education centres (July 3, 2018, Globe and Mail)
Authorities in China’s far western Xinjiang province have made loyalty to President Xi Jinping a central part of an extensive political re-education campaign that requires detainees to swear allegiance to the Communist Party while forswearing a Muslim faith that they are told to repeat is “stupid.”

U.S. warships pass through Taiwan Strait amid China tensions (July 7, 2018, Reuters)
Two U.S. warships passed through the Taiwan Strait on Saturday on a voyage that will likely be viewed in the self-ruled island as a sign of support by President Donald Trump amid heightened tension with China.

Spy For Us — Or Never Speak To Your Family Again (July 9, 2018, BuzzFeed)
China is using its huge digital surveillance system, and the threat of sending family members to reeducation camps, to pressure minorities to spy on their fellow exiles.

Get Back in the Sandbox! (July 9, 2018, ChinaSource Blog)
The way I like to describe it is this: imagine a sandbox on a beach with the borders of the sandbox being the political, civil, and religious boundaries set by the Party-state. Over the past 15-20 years, as the Party-state has relaxed its control and enforcement of those boundaries, individuals and sectors in China have been quietly climbing out of the sandbox onto the beach, where there is more freedom.

China's Xi pledges $20 billion in loans to revive Middle East (July 9, 2018, Reuters)
Beijing has ramped up engagement in the Middle East in recent years as Arab nations play an important role in Xi’s signature Belt and Road foreign policy plan for strong trade routes linking China with central and southeast Asia.

Dissident Liu Xiaobo's widow Liu Xia allowed to leave China (July 10, 2018, BBC)
The widow of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has left China for Germany after eight years in unofficial detention. Liu Xia, 57, left Beijing early on Tuesday and flew to Berlin. She had been under effective house arrest in the Chinese capital since her husband won the prize in 2010.

Liu Xia Leaves China After Years of House Arrest: Reactions (July 11, 2018, China Digital Times)
CDT Chinese editors note that sympathetic Weibo users have been offering thanks and praise to German leader Angela Merkel in an effort to avoid censorship of overt celebrations, while others have used the English word "freedom" or the Chinese 遗孀(yíshuāng, or "widow") for the same purpose.

Liu Xia’s release: half-way house toward freedom (July 11, 2018, Jerry’s Blog)
So for Liu Xia her release is a half-way house toward freedom, really a new form of restriction, another ingenious type of detention-equivalent administered by a PRC that spawns new types of detention almost every day…

Qin Yongmin: Prominent Chinese dissident jailed for 13 years (July 11, 2018, BBC)
One of China's highest-profile democracy campaigners has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for "subversion of state power".  Qin Yongmin, 64, has already spent a total of 22 years behind bars. Qin had "refused to cooperate with the court" and stayed silent throughout his trial, human rights lawyer Lin Qilei earlier told the AFP news agency.

Religion

House hunters (July 5, 2018, World Magazine)
Yet the freedom Zion has enjoyed for the past decade is coming to an end. Since the government implemented new religious regulations in February, authorities have targeted Zion, pressuring its leaders and church members to stop meeting. 

What Is God Doing In China? Steve Schirmer Answers (July 9, 2018, The Missions Podcast)
The President of China was just appointed to lifelong office. Church buildings are being demolished. Cults are on the rise due to a lack of trained church leaders. What is God up to in China? Steve Schirmer, president and founder of Silk Road Catalyst, joins us to answer.

The true state of the Chinese Church (July 9, 2018, Mission News Network)
People are coming to Christ, Bibles are being printed by the millions, churches are being built in every province, and pastors are being ordained and starting new congregations all over the country.

Listening to Pastors in China, Part 3 (July 10, 2018, Chinese Church Voices)
What challenges do Chinese pastors face? How do they find support in the church? From other pastors? This is part three of an article from the journal ChurchChina on what it means to be a pastor in China.

Conservatives in Catholic Church close ranks to stall dialogue with China, but won’t succeed: analysts (July 11, 2018, Global Times)
As the Chinese government and the Vatican reportedly entered a new round of talks in June on the appointment of bishops in China, analysts warn that the Pope's conservative opponents within the Catholic Church are trying harder than ever to undermine the dialogue. 

Society / Life

China’s Baby Blues: When Better Policies for Women Backfire (July 5, 2018, Foreign Policy)
Being a woman is hard, but being a woman in China is getting harder. China’s rapidly aging population and gender imbalance have led to looming demographic and societal issues, and women are caught in the crosshairs.

Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras (July 8, 2018, The New York Times)
Far from hiding their efforts, Chinese authorities regularly state, and overstate, their capabilities. In China, even the perception of surveillance can keep the public in line.

The Future of Shanghai as an International and Cosmopolitan City of Culture (July 9, 2018, The Asia Dialogue)
Promoting itself as a global city, Shanghai is facing unprecedented development opportunities as well as a series of new challenges. 

China’s leftover men (July 11, 2018, Shanghaiist)
Thanks to a highly successful one-child policy, China now has an acute gender imbalance. By 2020, there could be 40 million more men than women in the country, and this means that a significant proportion of men will have no hopes of marrying. 

Liaoning Wants You to Breed and Might Pay You For It (July 11, 2018, Sixth Tone)
The severely aging northeastern province is considering rewarding families for having a second child to stimulate fertility.

Unpacking China’s Cities (July 11, 2018, ChinaSource Blog)
Examining the data more closely, several trends emerge that help fill out the contours of China’s urbanization and provide a sense of what the cities will look like in the future.

Economics / Trade / Business

Chinese Company Coming to America: A Mostly True Horror Story (July 6, 2018, China Law Blog)
I am publishing this email to show very starkly how operating in a foreign country without being mindful of the legal and cultural differences between your home country and the foreign country can lead to disastrous results. 

What The Tit-For-Tat Tariffs Could Mean For The 2 Largest Economies (July 7, 2018, NPR)
NPR's Michel Martin speaks with David Wessel of the Brookings Institution about tariffs and their impact.

China Company Chops: The Basics (July 8, 2018, China Law Blog)
It has been more than five years since we blogged about what constitutes an official China company chop and it seems like our China lawyers are getting an uptick in requests for us to explain how to discern what is and is not an official China company chop. 

China’s Taste for Soybeans Is a Weak Spot in the Trade War With Trump (July 9, 20188, The New York Times)
Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs make American soy pricier. But the country’s huge demand for oil and animal feed makes it tough to stop importing overnight.

The future of the U.S.-China trade war (July 9, 2018, Brookings)
China is in a fairly good position to weather this storm. Its economy is less dependent on exports in general, and exports to the U.S. in particular, than just a decade earlier. 

China vows to retaliate as US threatens tariffs on further $200bn of goods (July 10, 2018, The Guardian)
The administration released a wide-ranging list of Chinese goods it proposes be hit with tariffs, including hundreds of food products as well as tobacco, coal, chemicals and tyres, dog and cat food, and consumer electronics including television components.

Canada's Tim Hortons to open 1,500 coffee shops in China (July 11, 2018, The Guardian)
The Canadian coffee shop chain Tim Hortons has announced it will open more than 1,500 branches in China over the next decade. “China’s population and vibrant economy represent an excellent growth opportunity for Tim Hortons in the coming years,” said Alex Macedo, president of the company known for its coffee and donuts.

Education

Government Shuts Over 200 Chinese-Foreign Education Partnerships (July 5, 2018, Sixth Tone)
The ministry has terminated 234 partnerships between Chinese and overseas institutions, including five jointly managed institutions. According to the ministry’s website, the sweep shut down institutions and programs that were poorly resourced or had poor teaching quality. The notice did not say when the closures took place.

Testing Times: The Lifelong Cost of Top Marks (July 6, 2018, Sixth Tone)
A coastal city in China is famous for its top exam results — but the intensive academic culture is grinding down teachers and students alike.

Preparing to Teach English in China? (July 6, 2018, ChinaSource Blog)
People from the Anglosphere who are considering going to China to teach English should prepare in several ways. Of course, they should be ready for life in China, which can vary from location to location and from year to year. 

Closures of China-Foreign Programs (July 11, 2018, Inside Higher Ed)
he program closures span a wide range of fields, including business, computer science, education, engineering and health care-related fields, and at least for the most part do not appear to be directly related to ideological imperatives on the part of the Chinese government.

Health / Environment

Beijing gets tough on trash (July 5, 2018, Christian Science Monitor)
Over the last two years, the authorities have pushed to bring under their control a recycling system that has long relied on an informal network of trash collectors like Liang. But that approach is failing as the number of scavengers declines and the amount of household waste rises. So the Chinese government is hoping to convince local residents to pick up the slack.

Guizhou Pilots Carbon Offset Poverty Alleviation Program (July 10, 2018, Sixth Tone)
Policymakers are hoping to kill two birds with one stone through a tree-planting program that endeavors to trap carbon emissions and combat poverty.

China cabinet launches new group to tackle pollution around Beijing (July 11, 2018, Reuters)
China’s cabinet has launched a new cross-ministerial leadership group that will help draw up plans to tackle pollution in smog-prone northern regions around the capital Beijing, it said in a notice on Wednesday.

Science / Technology

Rise: Why China’s Internet is Bigger.. And Different (July 11, 2018, Variety)
Abundant capital, rapid change, and growing sophistication are the key characteristics of China’s Internet landscape. So too is the guiding hand of the central government.

History / Culture

China pre WW2: along the Yangtze River. (July 6, 2018, Tong Bingxue, via Twitter)

Manpower of China, 1930s, along the Yangtze River. (July 6, 2018, Tong Bingxue, via Twitter)

Was This Powerful Chinese Empress a Feminist Trailblazer? (July 10, 2018, The New York Times)
Cixi, a peer of Queen Victoria’s and apparently iron-willed, has invited revisionist interpretations that view her as a feminist, at least in the context of the late 19th century, when women in China were treated little better than spittoons.

Travel / Food

A visit to the Bingling Caves in Gansu (July 6, 2018, Sapore di Cina)
Binglingsi (炳灵寺) – which literally means “cave of the thousand Buddhas” – is a complex of rocky caves located about 80 kilometers from Lanzhou, near a town called Liujiaxia.

TPG Readers’ Best Tips for Visiting China on Points and Miles (July 8, 2018, The Points Guy)
We recently asked our TPG Lounge readers to share their best tips and go-to ways for traveling to China on points and miles. Here’s what they had to say.

Wucaitan: Xinjiang’s Five-Colored Hills | Traveler’s Guide (July 9, 2018, Far West China)
五彩滩. Spelled out in pinyin it’s “Wucaitan“, which has been translated as either “Rainbow Beach” or “Five-Colored Hills“. Although normally dwarfed by Kanas Lake, it’s popular neighbor further north, this scenic Xinjiang gem is worth a second glance…if not a visit.

Living Cross-culturally

When “Home” isn’t a Place– The Challenges of Repatriation for Expat Kids (June 20, 2018, Expats Kids Club)
This time of year is filled often with many expat families heading back to their native countries – I know I have been saying my fair share of “goodbye’s” these weeks (they neverget easy)! And while it can be an exciting time, it is important to consider how kids may be feeling about going back to the place they call “home.” 

Links for Researchers

The Failure of the Campaign to Demolish Church Crosses in Zhejiang Province, 2013–2016 (浙江省2013-2016强拆教堂十字架运动的失败：一个时空分析): A Temporal and Spatial Analysis (Review of Religion and Chinese Society)
In 2013, the Zhejiang government initiated a campaign to demolish church crosses (DCC) throughout the province in the name of landscape improvement. In April 2016, the campaign was abruptly and quietly halted. The termination of the campaign was primarily due to unremitting resistance by Christians in Zhejiang. (available for purchase or rent)

Image credit: Kristoffer Trolle, via Flickr