ROGER GUO examines how Chinese government bodies use Douyin to generate patriotism, and how patriotism in turn drives Douyin’s popularity. TikTok, the most downloaded app on the App Store this past year, has faced growing scrutiny in the West even as its Chinese counterpart Douyin has thrived under China’s far stricter censorship laws. TikTok and Douyin are short-video sharing apps mainly used by teenagers, with … Continue reading A Patriotic Voice: The Rise of TikTok’s Counterpart in China

KARA LIU examines the shortfalls in the education of China’s migrant children and offers suggestions for volunteers. Beneath China’s soaring skyscrapers, 288 million migrant workers toil in the factories, construction sites, and service jobs that have powered the Chinese economic miracle. Despite their invaluable contributions to China’s rise, migrant workers experience systemic marginalization that deprives them of access to healthcare, education, and legal protection. Children … Continue reading No Child Left Behind: Deficiencies in the Education of China’s Migrant Children

SHARON LI explores applications of facial recognition technology in commerce and public facilities in China. In October 2019, the Trump administration added 28 additional Chinese organizations to its “Entity List,” effectively banning them from trading with US companies without government approval. Among these organizations were video surveillance companies Hikvision and Dahua, which the Commerce Department alleges are “implicated in China’s campaign targeting Uighurs and other … Continue reading Your Toilet Knows: Non-Surveillance Uses of Facial Recognition in China

ZHEYAN NI reviews Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China and Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation. An inquiry has been occupying my mind for a long time: are journalists or scholars the better story tellers of a society? Contrasting the two books in this review helps us understand their differences in approach and effect. Leslie Chang, the wife of famous China … Continue reading Comparative Analysis of Factory Girls and Korean Workers

MICHAEL TAN examines the Chinese civil service system and why it can potentially produce more effective leadership than democratic systems. Would a TV-celebrity and real-estate mogul with no political experience whatsoever ever be able to achieve the presidency in China? Such a feat, while possible in the United States, has next to no chance of happening in China, for reasons that lie in the extremely rigorous … Continue reading How the Chinese Political System Can Elevate More Competent Government Officials

ZHEYAN NI reviews the excellent historical work《追寻新共和：张东荪早期思想与活动研究 1886-1932》(The Search for a New Republic: A Study on Thoughts and Activities of Zhang Dongsun at His Early Age 1880-1932) published in 2018. To historians of Modern China, Zhang Dongsun cannot be more familiar. Yet outside of academia, he is almost unknown by the general public. Highly politicized historical narratives of twentieth century China only canonized winning or … Continue reading The Forgotten Fusionist: Review of《追寻新共和：张东荪早期思想与活动研究 1886-1932》

ANGELA LU details China’s massive internment of Uyghurs in “re-education camps,” as well as the international response and China’s subsequent tactical revisions. Since April 2017, as many as 1 million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim ethnic minority groups have been indefinitely detained in an ever-expanding secretive network of extrajudicial re-education camps across Xinjiang province. China’s rulers have long held a deep suspicion of Xinjiang’s ethnic … Continue reading Evil’s First Soft Touches: Uyghur “Re-Education” in China

ZHEYAN NI reviews the gripping generational memoir《故园的背影》(Retreating Figures in the Garden of the Past) published in 2018. Guyuan de Beiying 《故园的背影》(Retreating Figures in the Garden of the Past) consists of a series of memoirs written by Chinese students enrolled at Hunan Normal University in the early 1980s who later moved abroad to study and work in the United States. These stories vividly portray the authors’ memories … Continue reading Shadow of Cultural Revolution: Review of《故园的背影》

QI HANG CHEN tackles the sprawling environmental implications of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has the prerequisite elements for a massive environmental and climatic disaster. China’s pivot to green domestic policies has obscured the exportation of its environmentally damaging excesses abroad, in what is known as “shadow ecology”. While we must acknowledge China’s efforts to “green” the BRI through legal … Continue reading Sounding the Environmental Alarm on the Belt and Road Initiative