On April 30, as tensions around China’s claims to territories in the South- and East China Seas continued to simmer, we began what proved to be a popular ChinaFile Conversation, asking the question, What's Really at the Core of China’s ‘Core Interests’? The participants included Shai Oster of Bloomberg News, Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, Orville Schell of the Center on
It has long been standard operating procedure for China’s leaders to pay tribute to Mao. Even as the People’s Republic he wrought has embraced capitalist behavior with ever more heated ardor, the party he founded has remained firmly in power and his portrait has stared out over Tiananmen Square toward the squat building where his body reposes peacefully at the heart of a
Almost 500 previously unpublished documents about Zhao Ziyang, the bold reformer who served as China’s premier (1980-1987) and Communist Party general secretary (1987-1989), were smuggled out of China and published in late July by the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong. The documents show how Zhao led a decade of transformational economic reform and sketched out plans for
In 1898, some of China’s most brilliant minds allied themselves with the Emperor Guangxu, a young ruler who was trying to assert himself by forcing through reforms to open up China’s political, economic, and educational systems. But opponents quickly struck back, deposing the emperor and causing his advisors to flee for their lives. One, however, stayed put. He was Tan Sitong,
He was risking not the immediate arrival of soldiers, but the inevitable and life-threatening imprisonment that befalls all people who challenge state power in China today. This was not an active decision to die, but a willingness to do so. The tragedy was that his punishments grew with his moderation. Liu began life as a typical product of the Mao era: prone to extreme,