A weekly roundup of news and analysis to help you follow key developments in China and the Chinese church.
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China’s Twilight Years (June 2016, The Atlantic)
Not so long ago, conventional wisdom in China held that the country’s economy would soon overtake America’s in size, achieving a GDP perhaps double or triple that of the U.S. later this century. As demographic reality sets in, however, some Chinese experts now say that the country’s economic output may never match that of the U.S.
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China Reveals What It Wants to Do with Christianity (April 28, 2016, Christianity Today)
According to Xi, uniting all believers under CPC leadership is necessary to preserve internal harmony while warding off hostile foreign forces that may use religion to destabilize the regime. Xi’s insistence is not new, nor is it simply a function of China’s Communist rule. Since imperial times, state power has been seen as ultimate. It is, and has always been, the prerogative of the Chinese state to define orthodox belief and to set the boundaries for religious groups whose doctrines fall outside official limits.
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A warning for parched China: a city runs out of water (April 25, 2016, Marketplace)
Yang Shufang wakes up at 5 o'clock each morning and fetches water. "I bring a few buckets, enough for drinking or cooking," she says. Yang doesn’t live in the remote countryside, and her water isn’t from a village well. She lives on the seventh floor of a luxury condominium complex in Lintao, a Chinese city with nearly 200,000 people that’s run out of water.
New Visa Policies Bring China and US Closer (April 20, 2016, AmCham China)
What's more, reforms to Chinese immigration policies have now also made it easier for new foreign graduates and highly-skilled talent to work in China without interruption. The new regulations include 12 policies in Shanghai effective July 1, 2015 and 20 policies in Beijing effective March 1, 2016.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.