In February, a Chinese celebrity journalist named Chai Jing released a video on the Internet about the damage air pollution was causing her country. During the week it was online (before Chinese censors pulled it down), people viewed the video 200 million times. Air pollution is perhaps on more Chinese minds than ever before. Awareness of the problem has been growing in recent
It’s hard to believe, but ChinaFile is almost two years old. It’s been an exciting year for us, and, as ever, an eventful year for China. It was a year of muscular leadership from Xi Jinping, who has now been in office just over two years and who appears to be successfully consolidating his power within the Chinese Communist Party as he tightens his grip on a whole range of
It has been a busy season for U.S. diplomatic activity in China. Given the tensions aroused by U.S. involvement in the Bo Xilai scandal and the flight of the blind activist Chen Guangcheng, perhaps it should come as no surprise that even relatively indirect affronts to China’s sense of sovereignty should cause indignation. That seemed to be the case yesterday when senior