ChinaFile

How to Be Chinese and Progressive in 2026

Jeremy Goldkorn & Yaqiu Wang — Tuesday, March 24, 2026 - 10:19am

What does it mean to be a Chinese human rights advocate in 2026? Yaqiu Wang watched DOGE cuts gut reporting on political prisoners, refugee assistance networks, and labor rights work abroad, and argued in ChinaFile that the human rights community must urgently diversify away from U.S. government money. ChinaFile’s Jeremy Goldkorn recently chatted with Wang about the future of human rights work in China and how it will be funded, politics in the Chinese diaspora, women’s rights progress in China that is not captured by indicators, and how the internet and AI are challenging our notions of free speech. Wang exemplifies how being a Chinese person of conscience right now means navigating between two forces that both want to define you—and finding agency in refusing both definitions.

Censorship Is Not Deterring Global Adoption of Chinese AI

Wenhao Ma — Friday, March 6, 2026 - 1:11pm

China tech watchers have quickly pointed that Chinese LLMs face an obstacle almost guaranteed to hinder its capability and potential to compete with similar Western products: censorship. But DeepSeek and other Chinese AI companies have proven they can build LLMs that are competitive on the global market.

Is There An Off-Ramp for China and Japan?

Daniel R. Russel, Ryan Hass & more — Friday, March 6, 2026 - 9:00am

Japan-China relations are in a deep freeze that began in November when Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested that Japan could intervene militarily in the event of a Taiwan crisis. Beijing responded furiously, invoking World War II, banning exports of dual-use items to a list of Japanese companies, advising citizens against traveling there, and reimposing a seafood import ban. Meanwhile, Takaichi’s landslide election victory in February suggests little near-term softening. What lies ahead for Japan-China ties in 2026? Is there a plausible off-ramp here, or are both sides structurally locked in?

To Ensure a More Sustainable Future, Human Rights Work on China Should Move Away from U.S. Government Funding

Yaqiu Wang — Tuesday, March 3, 2026 - 9:42am

Last month, the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia announced that it had resumed broadcasts to audiences in China, after cuts under the Trump administration last year largely forced the outlet to halt operation. For many who care about independent journalism and human rights in China, the news brought a brief sigh of relief. However, last year’s dramatic cuts, some of them unlawful, should still be read as a stark warning about the financial vulnerability of the China human rights community.

Hǎi Profile: A Conversation with Jiaoying Summers

Jiaoying Summers & Jeremy Goldkorn — Wednesday, February 18, 2026 - 10:39am

Jiaoying Summers is a stand-up comic who is packing theaters around the U.S., and last year premiered a one-hour comedy special on Hulu. With three and a half million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, she owes much of her success to short video clips of her standup routines which began going viral as the COVID pandemic was shutting down live entertainment. She had just opened The Hollywood Comedy club in Los Angeles, and found herself performing on her own stage to an empty theater. Social media is still a vital part of her work. Clips of ethnic shtick, off-color jokes, and raunchy crowd work are most popular, but audiences also seem drawn to monologues and interviews on topics such as the trauma of growing up in small-town China with an alcoholic father.

For Chinese Writers, a Room of Their Own on Fifth Avenue

Jeremy Goldkorn — Wednesday, January 21, 2026 - 4:05pm

Accent Sisters is a New York publisher, bookstore, event space, and online network dedicated to fostering Chinese and Asian diaspora creative writing and culture. It is a strong facilitator and participant in the Chinese cultural scene organically growing throughout cities around the world that is changing the meaning of being “Chinese.”

Founder Li Jiaoyang, a poet and visual artist, told me that she and her co-founders “wanted to build a community space to help writers like us, because we found what we like to write is not always what Westerners want to see.” She was a creative writing student at NYU, and “feeling very lonely” as the only Chinese student in her program when she met a friend in a similar position at the New School. Together they launched an interview series featuring Chinese writers who work in their second language. They called it Accent Sisters.

Then the pandemic hit, and they got a grant from the British Council to produce a series of more than 30 online workshops centered on interdisciplinary poetry, gathering participants from the U.K., the U.S., and China. Li met her second cofounder in 2022 at a visual art show at Latitude Gallery in New York, an art gallery “dedicated to showcasing cutting-edge work . . . by emerging Asian diaspora artists.” They began chatting and realized that while they could name a number of galleries showing Chinese art, they knew of no bookstores dedicated to work by Chinese writers.

Today, Accent Sisters operates out of a seventh-floor space at 89 Fifth Avenue, sharing the floor with Fou Gallery and a tea house. The bookstore sells a collection of handpicked artists’ books, zines, and independently published titles that reflect the founders’ own reading interests. “We just sell the books we like to read,” Li says, and the books they publish themselves.

The space also hosts monthly art exhibitions featuring primarily female Asian artists, alongside screenings, concerts, book launches, craft workshops, and poetry readings. Accent Sisters events include inventive reinterpretations of Chinese social phenomena. One is a series of “dialect corners”—an inversion of the “English corners” common throughout China. Instead of Chinese people practicing English, participants gather to learn regional Chinese dialects like Sichuanese, Shanghainese, and Fuzhounese, and try cuisine from each region. The space has also hosted a “matchmaking corner” event mimicking the parent-run dating markets in Shanghai parks—except participants’ friends cross-dressed and pretended to be their parents, making posters to “sell” them. No men attended: “25 beautiful girls showed up and they were all lesbian and trans,” said Li, “and that’s beautiful.”

Accent Sisters remains a labor of love. The outfit operates without investors or grants, sustained by the founders’ unpaid work and the love and labor of community workers and volunteers. “Some friends even send their mums to volunteer for us,” Li said. But Li says they are on course to a sustainable business model, and there seems to be a growing demand. Li marvels at how New York’s Chinese cultural scene has exploded: “Every day, every week there are so many events I can go to. Sometimes I even feel a little overwhelmed—in a good way.”

A Family Derailed: On Writing ‘Trains’

Zha Jianying, Jeremy Goldkorn & more — Tuesday, January 13, 2026 - 1:05pm

ChinaFile recently published “Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival,” by Zha Jianying, the journalist and author of some of the most memorable recent books on contemporary China and particularly Chinese culture. This is a lightly edited, abridged transcript of a conversation between Zha Jianying and ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief Susie Jakes and Editorial Fellow Jeremy Goldkorn.

ChinaFile: Trains opens with a joyful, cinematic scene of you as a kid, a tough girl who becomes “number one train hopper,” the champion amongst your peers of hitching rides on trains leaving the Beijing railway station. This took place not too far from where you lived, near the Beijing railway station. What is in that neighborhood now? Can you describe the way it was when you were a kid?

Zha Jianying: When I was hopping trains, I was in Beijing Elementary School, a neighborhood school close to where my family lived. Right now, that area east of Jianguo Gate has become full of expensive high rises. It’s sort of a golden area for a lot of companies, and an upscale kind of neighborhood. But back then in the 1960s, my family first moved there because my father was a research fellow for the Academy of Social Sciences. And the Academy had four buildings in that neighborhood surrounded by all kinds of factories and workers’ dormitory complexes in the area. The school that I entered one year after the Cultural Revolution began, which was the time when the [college] entrance exam was abandoned, was the neighborhood school. So my schoolmates were predominantly factory kids.

One of the factories in the neighborhood was [attached to] the Beijing railway station. We could see it from my family’s balcony. This was a workshop for trains. When they come back from a long journey, they need checkups. So the railway tracks happened to be right in front of our school gate. And often in the afternoon, when we finished a day of very boring classes—at that point during the Cultural Revolution, a lot of it was just boring political studies—all of us would get very excited by the passing trains, which would be passing right in front of our school gate at a reduced speed. Most of the kids would rush to the train, but just look or shout at it. But a smaller group, mostly boys, would try to hop onto the train because you can jump up if you aim at grabbing one of the handlebars outside the train.

You can then ride the train. I was pretty much the only girl among that group. I was tallish and sort of a tomboy, so I was pretty good at it. And therefore, that’s what I did. I developed some kind of reputation. These boys would see me coming on the playground and they would sing this sort of ditty about me that rhymes in Chinese.

蹲班生，查建英!
扒火车，第一名!
Class squatter, Zha Jianying!
Number One, Train hopping!

It was kind of a mocking ditty to make fun of me for being tall and doing something boys do. But, you know, I was kind of happy that I got a grudging admiration for train hopping by these mostly factory kids, kind of tough boys. But the “class squatter” part of the ditty was about my being tall. I looked like I’d been held back by a grade, which was true because when I was supposed to get into grade one, it was the year the Cultural Revolution broke out. And so everything broke down and they didn’t have any admission. So as a result, I entered grade school when I was almost eight. I was among the tallest in my class, and among the girls by far the tallest.

Years later, after you have been writing for many years, you begin to find out the story of your grandfather in whose life trains played a very important role. In “Trains,” you write about his boarding a train to take a ship back to China. He leaves his French wife and child on the platform, never to see them again.

Boarding that train back to China sealed his fate. Do you see his returning as a real choice or was it coercion? Could any young Chinese man of his generation have resisted the telegram he received from his family saying falsely that his mother had died and that he needed to come home for the funeral? He didn’t know it was in order to get him to marry a chosen Chinese bride, he thought his mother had died. Could anybody like him really refuse that kind of request without becoming permanently estranged from his family?

That is a good question. Why did he answer that telegram? My grandfather belonged to that generation of the early kind of Republican, an era between the old and the new. That generation of educated Chinese, they were caught between their duty to the family, to their ancestral home and country, and they were also fired up by a sort of sense of a mission to build a new China through knowledge from the West. That’s why my grandfather went to France to begin with, but he was the oldest son of a landed gentry family in Hubei, which basically instilled in him a deep sense of filial duty.

Features 11.12.24 Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival Zha Jianying Every morning, I crossed a stretch of railway tracks on the way to my school. The tracks lay less than a hundred meters from the school gate, and a train often appeared in the late afternoon just as we were discharged. Sometimes it was a freight...

During those 10 years, when he left as a 17-year-old young man and spent a longer than expected time in France, getting his degree, partially funded by family money, and partially by working in French factories, he was part of this famous movement, a work-study program. He survived that by working hard and studying hard. A lot of the students became radicalized because of the lack of funding. They just went into communist revolution, most of them did not really finish their degrees. And the radicals would be more prone to abandon the old culture. Some of the people like that may not have been so deeply caught in the call of family duty, but not my grandfather. He was a nerdy kind of kid, good at studies. He found his calling as an engineer. Part of it was studying, and railway building, things like that. And the other part was that he felt guilty. During the time he was in France, I think he was gradually Westernized by a whole set of more modern values, liking French culture, and he met a French woman who was the daughter of his landlord. After he got his degree, he was working as a young engineer, married to a French woman, with a baby girl. I think he was very ambivalent about breaking this news to his parents. He was taking his time. His family did not know why he took so long [to come back to China], and they wanted to rush him back, and he seemed to be just not coming back. So they came up with this plan to trick him, knowing that he’s the kind of son, he’s kind of Chinese older son for whom not returning for your mother’s funeral would be on his conscience forever. That’s just not something someone like my grandfather would do.

Have you ever attempted to find your grandfather’s descendants in France?

For many years after I knew about this, I felt almost guilty by proxy, that my grandfather abandoned his wife and his own daughter in France. I felt a little bit ashamed about asking into this, what his French wife and daughter did afterwards, do I have French cousins, French aunts, things like that.

But besides my feeling ambivalent about looking them up, what am I going to say? Hi, I’m the granddaughter of so-and-so who abandoned your grandma? But besides that, it’s not my fault, but he’s my grandpa, right? And I have this weird sense of affinity about what he did. But anyway, another factor that would make this whole process tricky was that like many of his contemporaries, he was changing names.

He was born with a given name and family name. And then he changed his name to Liu Xin—the family name stayed the same, but Xin means “new.” He just decided he would take a new name and the name literally means new. And there’s no way for me to know for certain which name he used on his marriage certificate.

What do you make of his decision to maintain his French habits in China? The Omega watch, the fountain pen, French books, and even those mantou buns that you described that were really some kind of fusion bread between a Chinese steamed bun and a croissant that he was secretly making with butter?

I think it wasn’t a decision, it was a habit. After all, he went to France when he was 17, still part of one’s formation period. And he stayed there for 10 years. And he was embedded in his studies, and then he stayed in a French house and he married a French woman. So he really became a kind of immigrant . . . The French way of living was apparently quite attractive to him. But he kept many of [these habits] secret. Bit by bit, I learned he had the Parker pen and this watch and he had a camera, he had a dark room, he developed film in his own house, and he baked and he made sausages.

And he danced. He loved to dance. This was one of the details I learned from my aunt, she said, “our father loved to dance, but our mother had bound feet.” From the late Qing to the early Republican period, in middle class, respected families, the women still bound their feet. She only took the bindings off when my grandfather sent a letter from France knowing this was going to be his future wife, saying no, I don’t like bound feet. But still she wobbled as a result of the binding. And she couldn’t really dance.

But you yourself as a child when you spent time with him, you never saw any of this residue of him having lived in France?

No, the first time I found out that he had a past in France was when I tiptoed into his room when he was visiting my parents’ house in Beijing. This was during the late part of the Cultural Revolution. I was curious about what he was reading. When he went out for a walk, I went [into his room] and saw he was reading these bilingual pamphlets. At that point, I didn’t even know what it was. I knew it was a foreign language on one side. The other side was Chinese. These were Cultural Revolution pamphlets about Mao and People’s Daily editorials. There was a series of them. But on the left side of the pamphlets my grandfather had, there was a foreign language. I didn’t know if it was French or English, and I asked my mother. That was the first time she told me about his past in France. And very soon after that, she told me that when she was a girl, this was actually an open secret in the family, my grandmother and all the children knew about his French marriage. It wasn’t hidden among them when they were young. And she told me one of the vivid images she carried in her mind, because my grandfather told her in great detail about that train station farewell, how they parted and his French wife was holding this baby girl and waving this white scarf until they disappeared and none of them knew this was going to be forever.

This was really shocking to me.

You also write a lot about your Uncle Lusheng, who tracks a trajectory from romantic revolutionary to being horribly persecuted as a rightist. There are parallels with your grandfather’s story of being an idealist and then winding up very disillusioned. Do you see this as a kind of a generational curse?

The journey of disillusionment happened with a lot of Chinese, but most bitterly with the educated Chinese, what we call intellectuals, because they’re the ones who carried this sense of mission about using their knowledge to build a modern China, to build a stronger China. They believed that communism was the answer. In the earlier part of this Trains series, I describe a period where a lot of different ideologies were tossed around in China, like anarchism, like the group of anarchists in China who sponsored the work-study movement in France which my grandfather was a part of. But that road was not taken. It did not win the day. The October Revolution won the day, and so the intellectuals thought that was the way. And the communists had a very strong popular support. The intellectuals willingly accepted this ruling party as the one which would unify the nation. Throughout so many political campaigns, the intellectuals were targeted and still they went along with it, hoping against hope that somehow this is part of the price for their past guilt—like being a part of the bourgeois, being part of the elite privileged class—they have to go through this, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of a stronger China. But I think that disillusionment deepened more and more after the anti-rightist campaign, the Cultural Revolution.

My uncle was just one of the many who started out with this very naive idealism. My uncle faked his age when he was just 15 or something, trying to join the so-called volunteer troops to fight in the Korean War. And then later, when he was still a very young man, during the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, by submitting some very mild critical suggestions about the army—he was a young officer at that point—he was persecuted, stripped out of the army, sent to a farm where he more or less spent 20 years, and it ruined his life. Later, he became mentally deranged. A lot of it had to do with the shock of the political campaigns and family trauma and all this.

You argue in the fifth part of the piece that China’s historical traumas have created an obsessive focus on stability and prosperity over liberty and that this seems to be something that is just an inherent part of Chinese culture now.

But there are other countries with traumatic histories—Germany, South Korea—that have chosen different paths. Is there something that makes the Chinese case different, this obsessive focus on historical trauma? Or, to put the question another way, are you maybe casting an orientalist gaze on your own country?

I am not sure what you mean by orientalist?

In the West there is a stereotype of Chinese people being willing to put up with any political indignity because of something essential to Chinese culture. I’m wondering, particularly given the context of the United States right now, where many people seem more than happy to completely compromise their principles in order for a little bit of prosperity and stability, is this a China thing, or is it just human nature?

I’m completely aware of the stereotypes about the Chinese national character. But that’s not what I’m trying to portray. I think it’s a lot more complex and layered than that. What you just cited, the examples of Germany and South Korea, both went through war and trauma, and colonization in South Korea. They come out of it differently because, not because their race is different, I don’t think it’s a racial factor, it’s a political system. They both became democracies. Whatever flaws in democracy in those two countries, they both went through a deep political change post-war, post-colonization. They both had to go through a deep national soul-probing, of coming to terms with the dark past. [In Germany it was with] their own internal crimes, like the Nazi crimes against Jews. It took them some time, but they went through that process. And in South Korea, they fought a long war, which even today you can see that legacy again in their attitude towards Japan about the war crimes. And then their own internal dictatorship. They went through a long period of American-supported military, authoritarian rule for the sake of economic growth. And the South Korean economy grew very fast. Still, they did not stop there. They pushed very hard for democracy, for political reform, and they became a democracy. You might add to that Japan. There’s another Asian culture, right? Both Korea and Japan were, by the way, heavily influenced by Chinese Confucian culture, but they became politically modern nations.

Not China. China had the unfortunate reality of picking communism from Russia, from the Soviet Union, and sort of under the cloak of Marxism, has retained a lot of its own feudal ways; its own authoritarian tradition was not changed under communism. So the political system did not really change. Okay. And so.

People here in the U.S. are scared of China in terms of AI and all this, but politically, it’s a dinosaur. Citizens have no right to vote, no right to free speech. You compare the current problems of the two countries, it’s two different animals, apples and oranges. In the long run, no matter how long it takes for Americans to go through this horrible, horrible, horrible period—and a lot of us are quite anguished about this, and it may take a long time—it’s not comparable to what China is. China has high speed rail, but going where? People are just economic animals. They have no rights. All of the Chinese middle class, they do everything by their cell phone. Their life is so convenient, so comfortable. But they’re all scared shitless. No intellectuals dare to say anything contrary to the Party-state. These officials are following Xi Jinping’s cue, they’re no different from the court eunuchs of the past. This is just a modern extension of the Qing dynasty.

This is not a conclusion I arrived at easily or happily. I’m not happy to see my homeland in this state. It’s like a wealthy desert. The food is better, I agree. The food is better.

Why did you choose the railway as the central metaphor for this piece?

In the beginning, I really was just thinking that it was time for me to write about my family history. And I wanted to start with my grandfather because I thought his journey as an abortive immigrant has a lot of echoes with my own life. Making sense of his life is almost like making sense of my own life. So I started with details of my own childhood train-hopping, and that metaphor and image of him saying goodbye to his French wife and daughter, both have to do with trains. But as I dug into it more, I realized trains are a very apt metaphor, both in terms of this particular family history and as sort of a central metaphor for China’s journey of modernization. Building trains was a dream for China, for the Chinese, starting basically soon after the Opium War, and the First Sino-Japanese war in 1894-1895. Japan learned a lot from China in the imperial past, and suddenly China was defeated by its own pupil. And then it looked closer and realized that the Japanese had done so much better with their adoption of Western knowledge. And China focused on railways because they are a sign of a certain stage of industrialization. [The railway was] born together with the modern cinema. Films about railways added to this mystique about railways and trains symbolizing a modern age.

So the great reformists of the late Qing and early Republican period all strongly advocated for the building of railways. And then later, Sun Yat-sen, the first president of Republican China, as soon as he stepped down as president, he became the general director of railway-building. In his major work, something called “Jianguo Fanglue,” a “Plan for National Reconstruction,” is a vision of building a grand national railway system that would connect all parts of Chinese territories and speed up all these other subsidiary industries, like steel production, coal mining . . . everything would be connected.

Of course, he never got to realize that plan. But my grandfather as a young man [took part in] railway-building. His hometown in Hubei happened to be an ancient site for coal mining, and so building the railway started in that area. All this made me realize that this is a ripe metaphor for China’s journey of trying to modernize the country.

And then of course, I started with my own childhood train-hopping and traced back to my grandfather leaving France, and my grandmother’s suicide. That was a crucial event that I discovered a long time later. At the time, suicide was such a shameful act in China, even though it became more common during the Cultural Revolution when a lot of suicides were triggered by political persecution and trauma. But it was a sort of shameful act. The families often tried to hide it because there would be a stigma carried by the surviving family members as a sin, as a crime. The Cultural Revolution code of language for this kind of political suicide literally means to “sever yourself from the people.” In my family’s case, it happened to be a suicide on the railway.

I was reading Anna Karenina shortly after I discovered how my grandmother killed herself. I couldn’t help thinking about how as a woman, you throw yourself under a train, when you’ve completely lost hope, you do this kind of act almost like a self-mutilating protest, because the word “train” was also used in a certain way in the Chinese language. When I was growing up during the Cultural Revolution, it was a culture full of loudspeakers shouting about the train of the times, the locomotive of history . . .

Could you have written “Trains” in Chinese?

I never thought of it because if I write it to be published on a Chinese platform, I have to censor myself, which is one of the main reasons I became a U.S. citizen in 1992, post-Tiananmen. It really made me realize if I want to write without censorship, I would have to write in English. Until recently, all my unabridged writing in Chinese was published only in Hong Kong.

Do you feel like writing in English changes what you would say in other ways? Or are you really just kind of finding English ways to express what you would have said in Chinese or translate in some way from Chinese?

I feel like you’re always kind of the same person, but I know that some writers feel like there are certain things they can express in the language of their exile that they can’t express in their native language.

After many years of writing in English, I really don’t think I’m translating in the literal sense. I’m thinking in English when I write in English. However, clearly Chinese is my first language. I was a Chinese language major until I came to the U.S. as a post-graduate. My whole college education was majoring in Chinese literature and language. So English always felt like a second language to me. And when I write in English, I’m very much aware I’m writing for an audience where I can’t assume that they know certain things about China like I do when I write in Chinese for a Chinese audience.

I do feel the constraint of writing or speaking to an audience for whom [China] is a foreign topic. I have to put in a lot of [explanations] in the text, whereas in Chinese, I can assume. Secondly, I am aware I have a smaller audience in English because, as my agent reminds me, the average American really doesn’t care that much about China. This is just not their issue. Whereas Chinese readers are interested in anything about China, but they’re also more interested in America and the West.

In recent years, I’ve decided I’m fed up with Chinese censorship. I’m going to just focus on writing in English with my limited time and energy.

The Sichuan Pepper Guy

Jeremy Goldkorn — Friday, January 9, 2026 - 10:05am

Yao Zhao is the founder of 50Hertz Tingly Foods, a company that sells Sichuan peppercorns (花椒, huajiao) and a variety of oils and snacks made with them. His first career was in clean energy development and rural electrification, but last year he left his World Bank job to devote himself full time to his startup and to proselytizing on the joys of tingly condiments.

He is an exemplar of a trend of young Chinese people opening restaurants and launching food brands outside of China that broaden the boundaries of the cuisine of their native land. I chatted with him recently about 50Hertz, the special products it’s centered on, and what it is like running an import business in the age of Trump tariffs.

Jeremy Goldkorn: You were born in Chongqing and you grew up there, right?

Yao Zhao: Yeah, I was born and raised in Chongqing. I just came back from Chongqing about 48 hours ago! I was there for three weeks visiting family and suppliers and farmers.

Chongqing is very trendy now.

You’re nice.

No, very trendy. Never used to be. I remember first going to Chongqing in 1996 and people in Beijing said “what a dirty place.” And it was kind of gritty.

It’s gritty. It’s a gritty place. It’s always been. It’s a port city, so it has all the characteristics of a port city. But now there’s a new wave of development, the AI wave, tourism is huge. It was palpable when I was in Chongqing [recently]. You see how many international tourists are in Chongqing now.

But you left Chongqing?

After high school in Chongqing, I went to Beijing for college. I actually went to the China Foreign Affairs University, which is supposed to be the cradle of Chinese diplomats. I was supposed to be a Chinese diplomat. I had all the education. I was set to go into the Foreign Ministry. But after four years, I didn’t think I would fit in the Chinese bureaucracy. So then I traveled for a year, backpacking. While I was in India, I saw . . . just . . . sheer poverty. So I decided to do international development.

I applied for one of the best schools in that field, which is Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And then I came to D.C., did a two-year Master’s degree focusing on energy, electrification, rural electrification. Then I actually moved to Abu Dhabi and lived there for two years working for the International Renewable Energy Agency. And then I came back to D.C. working for the World Bank. So it’s a bit of a circuitous route.

Doing renewables in the land of black gold?

You would think so, right? You would think it’s such an oil and gas rich place, but they actually—I’m talking about more than 10 years ago, 12 years ago—they really focused on clean energy, green energy back then. Even now, they constantly outbid all the other places to have the cheapest solar power or wind power. I guess they know their wealth is from energy. If the energy is going to come from a different source, they better get on top of it.

But we digress. How did you go from World Bank guy to Sichuan Pepper Guy?

I founded this company called 50Hertz Tingly Foods, focusing on this one unique ingredient, huajiao or Sichuan peppercorns. I think the numbing tingling sensation from huajiao is just so unique. I think it can go beyond Chinese food or Sichuan food, beyond the mala [the Sichuan taste combination of Sichuan peppercorns and chili peppers]. I started ideating this company in 2018, and I started the company in 2020, when the pandemic hit.

Great timing!

Yeah! Originally in 2018, I went home for Chinese New Year and my mom was making a cucumber salad. And then she finished it off with green Sichuan pepper oil, and then I thought, wow, I grew up with this, it’s not something new, but I’d been living and traveling abroad for many years now at that point, and that flavor and that sensation, I’d never had that anywhere else in the world. So when I came back to D.C.I brought back just a run-of-the-mill bottle of green Sichuan pepper oil. At home, I was making pasta with my partner and he added some to a pasta dish. He said, “Wow, this is incredible! Maybe this can go beyond Chinese food, can go into pasta, pizza!” That inspired me to start thinking about this.

Now, you have an empire!

Thank you. No, not not really. But yeah, we are selling different kinds of Sichuan peppercorn oils, candy, snacks, different products. Right from the get go, my whole vision was not just selling pepper oils or peppercorns. I want to sell a new kind of sensation. I want to make this unique spice, this spice that is indigenous to Sichuan, I want to make this indigenous spice known to the world. I want to make it approachable.

My first impression of Sichuan cuisine was, of course, red chili peppers, and I assumed that Chinese had been cooking with them for thousands of years. But of course that’s wrong, they actually came from South America and it was only after the Columbian Exchange after the late 15th century that the chili pepper arrived in China. But the Sichuan peppercorn is truly indigenous. It’s a real native Chinese plant.

Your company has avoided a very Chinese look in your packaging and your brand identity, but when you think about the product and your mission, what part does Chineseness or the Chinese origin of huajiao play?

Oh, I think that’s the origin, right? It will always be a Chinese spice. As you said, chili peppers are a Colombian Exchange product that came into China in the Ming dynasty, even the Chinese name for chilis is haijiao (海椒), hai, “overseas pepper,” “overseas” like your newsletter. For my brand, I want the branding to speak to American or Western [customers], but I think it’s Chinese through and through. Our supply chain is rooted in China. We single-origin source from Chongqing, Yunnan, and Sichuan.

“Artisanal” would be the word that’s fashionable now. You know where they come from?

Yeah. You can even know which farmer harvested which branch because you can trace it back. Because I built the supply chain directly with the suppliers. There’s no middleman. So we know which basket a pepper comes from because it has a name written on it, which farmer this basket is from.

Why are you called 50Hertz?

When I was researching this business idea, I read in this paper that a scientist in London measured the frequency of the buzzing numbing feeling induced by Sichuan pepper. He had 100 people sitting in a room, and then they hooked a mechanical vibrator to their fingers, and they could adjust the mechanical vibrating frequency. And then they applied Sichuan pepper oil to their lips, and the people compared it to the mechanical vibrator and most people said 50 hertz was the closest.

Obviously your lips are not vibrating at 50 hertz. There is a chemical in Sichuan pepper called hydroxy-alpha-sanshool. That chemical triggers your brain to think it’s vibrating, but it’s not actually creating 50 hertz of motion.

The name of the company indicates that you’re going to be pretty focused just on this one spice. Are you looking at sort of different product lines or maybe selling it in industrial quantities to restaurants?

I just want to do one thing. There are so many chili crisps, chili oils, Sichuan food brands out there already. I started with the oil and peppers and then our real big break was our tingly peanuts because, as you know, it’s very hard to explain to people, like, “I want to sell this new spice, it's numbing, it’s tingling.” People just don’t get it. But as soon as they try the peanuts they get it and then actually fall in love with it.

Snacks are actually a very important flavor carrier. Peanuts are great. We want to expand peanuts. We want to distribute peanuts to grocery stores more and more offline. And we just launched Tingly Cashews. We also make chocolate, and brittles.

How are you dealing with the tariffs and Trump uncertainty?

This year has been very, very tumultuous. I went full time after five years. I left the World Bank in April.

So this is it now? You've jumped! Congratulations.

I told my boss that I needed to move on the day before “Liberation Day.” The next day, the tariff went up to 145 percent on my most popular product, the Tingly Peanuts. But we got very lucky, actually, because our products were already loaded on the boat, about five hours before the 145 percent hit. So we just narrowly dodged the bullet by five hours.

And then, I think what I’m good at is communication. I was very candid with all of our customers. I said we’re facing like $40,000, just tariffs. I need cash, $40,000. We put out some sales on our current inventory and everyone came out and supported us. We got one of our biggest sales days after I sent out that email. It was very transparent about what we were facing. So I think that’s the beauty of doing business in the U.S. and also building a small community. You are able to talk to your customers directly and people are rooting for small businesses, bootstrapping businesses. So that’s very heartwarming to me.

How Will China Respond to Maduro’s Capture?

Parsifal D’Sola Alvarado, Brian Hioe & more — Friday, January 9, 2026 - 9:27am

On January 3, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a nighttime raid on Caracas and flew him to New York to face drug trafficking charges. Trump announced the U.S. would temporarily “run” Venezuela until a transition of power occurs. Beijing immediately released a statement condemning the U.S.’s “blatant use of force against a sovereign state and its actions against the president of another country,” and a similar statement at the United Nations on January 5. Does this change China’s calculus on Taiwan? What is the larger global significance for China of the new American posture?

“The Dating Game” in China

Jeremy Goldkorn & Violet Du Feng — Monday, November 24, 2025 - 2:26pm

Violet Du Feng has produced and directed more than a dozen documentary films about China. Her latest is The Dating Game, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Filmed in Chongqing, the film follows a group of desperate bachelors participating in a dating “boot camp.”

In this Q&A, Feng talks about how a film about women inspired her to make a film about men, the problems facing China’s many young single men, especially those from lower economic classes, their “incel” peers in the U.S., women who “date” AI boyfriends, and filmmaking in a low trust environment.

The interview was recorded via video call, and has been abridged and edited for clarity.

The Dating Game has a New York theatrical run from December 12 to 18.

Jeremy Goldkorn: What drew you to this subject matter?

Violet Feng: My last film, called Hidden Letters, is the story of an ancient secret language called nüshu, created and shared only among women, [and the contemporary women rediscovering it]. Once I finished that film and I was on tour with it, I often had audience members ask me: “Are there any good men in China?” When I was finishing the film, I thought about how we’re living in a society, not just in China but around the world, of extreme gender divides. I knew I had to cross the aisle and challenge my own biases and stereotypes and my own perspective as a woman to try to understand men’s perspective.

I knew these kinds of dating camps existed in China, and I thought they provided a contained and interesting framing for understanding the consequences of the One Child Policy that had led to China’s gender imbalance.

I also think we’re heading towards a time of crisis of how we connect with each other as human beings in this digital age. So I felt like that dating camp also provided me a lens to interrogate larger issues.

How did you find the subjects of the film?

Basic research. There are quite a few of this kind of dating coach. But what intrigued me about Hao [the film’s protagonist] is that he is from the working class, the same kind of group as the clientele that he’s providing services for. He’s very much from one of them. Deep inside, he really understands where they come from, their dire situation emotionally, the psychological profile of that generation of men. And so that part of him is very genuine, sincere. And that’s in contrast to the way that he’s coaching these guys to behave. So I thought there was some conflict inside him; he’s also struggling to figure out who he is.

Did you find him by placing advertisements, or . . ?

He was easy to find. There were several articles written about him, and particularly there was a very sensationalistic article mentioning him and a couple of other dating coaches. That article was published a few years ago. It went viral and almost completely destroyed that entire industry of dating coaches, and Hao thought that he had to change careers. He was really in a really bad place. But then three days later, his phone just started ringing nonstop. And that made him realize that there was actually a huge demand. He couldn’t quit.

And no publicity is bad publicity.

Exactly.

The characters in the film, Hao and his wife and the three dating students, are all telegenic and interesting people. Were you just lucky and those three students were the group that Hao had signed up at the time he agreed to make the film, or did you see other groups that he’d coached and that weren’t suitable?

It took a while for me to build trust with Hao, but once he agreed to be in the film . . . actually, it was thanks to his wife, who is also a dating coach. She saw my previous film, Hidden Letters, and convinced Hao that I was someone he could trust. Hao holds seven-day dating camps all year long, not only in the city where we filmed, Chongqing, where he’s based, but all over the country.

We decided that we were going to film one of his camps, but we would have an open call for his potential clientele, well over 3,000 clients, to see who would be interested in being part of this film. We were very transparent with his potential clients about what we were doing and why: It wasn’t to promote Hao, which he understood too, but it was to reveal the situation the clients were facing, the struggles they were facing. So we asked them if they would be interested in coming forward to share their stories.

So everybody agreed right up front?

I think the reason they decided to come forward was that they wanted to share their stories, not just to say that they were working class and that’s why they were failing, but also to ask how they got to this place. So in the end, these three people, they were comfortable, they trusted me, and then they also have just really adorable voices, and they were excited to be part of this journey.

They are adorable. You said earlier that somebody had asked you, “are there good men in China?” and I was just thinking, these three are such sweethearts.

Yeah, but at the same time, you understand why they’re not seen in China at all. So I think that for them, this whole experience provided a kind of visibility. They finally felt seen.

In The Dating Game, you succeeded in capturing some very revealing moments. There’s the scene at the dinner table with Hao and his wife where she gives him a piece of her mind.

At that point you realize she’s the most grounded person in the film. And you wish the boys would take her advice instead of his advice. And one of the protagonists talks about growing up around only boys, and not understanding women. These are “left behind kids,” their parents went to big cities to work and they were raised by grandmothers, very few girls around them partly because of female infanticide, as one of the boys points out. So they grew up not knowing girls.

A big theme of this film is that young Chinese men of this kind don’t really know even how to talk to women. How difficult is it for young men such as your protagonists to understand how they should approach finding a girlfriend or a wife?

As I was filming, I finally understood on an emotional level the trauma that this whole generation of boys face. We’re talking about this surplus of men in Chinese society, 30 million more men than women. A lot of them are in rural areas, small towns, and when their parents moved to the cities, residency regulations meant they couldn’t travel with their parents and go to school in the cities. So they were left behind, raised by their grandparents. And we’re talking about over 60 million of these kids growing up without parents and now they’re the ones who are on the dating market. I think that it’s not just the boys, but the girls, this whole generation grew up lacking love and that has affected what kinds of relationships they want. They don’t understand what kinds of relationships they want, because they don’t know who they are.

At the beginning, when I was following this dating camp, I thought that the storyline would be for these men to find love, and whether they found a girlfriend or a date at the end would be the dramatic moment. But I came to realize that the camp was more about helping them find themselves. I also realized they actually came to the camp because they were curious about Hao. He seems very successful today as a dating coach, very popular among this whole group of men. But he’s also from the working class, from deep poverty in a rural area. He was also a left behind child. So these men actually look up to him and they’re very curious how he made it.

I heard again and again from these men that they look up to him because he’s the most relatable person who actually went beyond who they were, and made it.

And that Hao has such a beautiful and educated wife to them is sort of like a dream. So I think all of it together to them is like, how did he do that?

How do you compare the world of these young men in China to what people are calling a “masculinity crisis” in the West, or the problem of “incels” or “involuntary celibates,” who stew in online misogyny because they can’t find a girlfriend?

And what is the relation between this kind of camp and Western “PUA” or “pickup artist” subculture—and also on a related Western phenomenon, the pickup artist, misogynistic men who show off online about how many sexual partners they have? Some of the ideas of this pickup artist culture seem to have seeped through to Hao?

I find it really fascinating because I think the pickup artist concept is kind of outdated in the West already, but it’s been sort of reintroduced in the past 10 years in China. I think it has to do with the rise of capitalism in China, how everything is tied up with a very narrow definition of success in society and everything is intertwined with money and status that's defined by money.

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However, I think that there’s another aspect of this particular to China because this whole generation of men has had so little interaction with women, no role models of relationships from their parents. They are completely clueless about what a modern relationship looks like, but at a time when the internet has developed so much and the feminist movement in China is sometimes kind of extreme online. So to a degree, I feel like these men are triple left behind, not only in terms of their material life because of where they come from, educational level, and then, you know, an upbringing without love, but also in terms of their conception of gender roles which is still very much trapped in the old kind of patriarchal mindset.

When the success of a man is defined by how much money he can make, his ability to find a wife, his ability to have children, he has failed on every front. And then they’re in the bottom social class as well. So I think that while some of this owes to the uniqueness of China’s cultural and societal economic situations, there are also the consequences of capitalism that reinforce the patriarchal mindset in the country.

The film is called The Dating Game, but there is not much actual dating that goes on, with the exception of one date that happens off camera. But as you were making the film, did you research how young Chinese people are courting or dating?

“Dating” just wasn’t a thing that young Chinese people did at all for the first decade I lived in China, until maybe the late aughts when there were Valentine’s Day promotions and young people started doing things that looked like American dating. What can you say about the current dating scene, not just for the protagonists of your film, but also for urban Chinese?

There are similarities with New York, where I live. For the younger generation, it feels like not dating is kind of the trend, let alone getting married. I feel like the younger generation are so resistant to marriage now that, as we mentioned in the film, the birth rate is so low, China has had to close a lot of kindergartens all over the place.

And as we mention in the film, a lot of girls not only are not interested in dating real boyfriends, but they’re dating AI boyfriends. They feel their needs for emotional support can be fulfilled by AI.

So the protagonists of the film are not just facing the problem of 30 million too many men for women, they’re also facing competition from beautiful, very tender AI bot men. Can you talk about the AI dating companions?

[AI boyfriends] have been developing so rapidly in China for the last couple of years that by the time we finished filming, I think there were more than 10 million Chinese girls using them because these AI dating apps particularly target women. At least among the women that I talked to, every one of them had no interest in having a real boyfriend. They feel satisfied with AI boyfriends.

I think there are a couple of reasons. One of those is that, as in the West, women are a lot more independent in terms of their careers, in terms of doing what they want. So I think that they are much more focused on themselves, and they feel like their emotional needs can be fulfilled by AI. But at the same time, there was a wave of the feminism movement. And so they realized more and more that in their parents’ generation, their grandparents’ generation, women were treated unfairly. But at the same time, the societal and cultural expectations for women in marriages haven’t really changed at all.

That was kind of in my last film, Hidden Letters. I felt like men’s understanding about gender roles and their expectations for women and wives and mothers haven’t changed either. So for them there’s this gap, they haven’t caught up.

Are there problems with AI boyfriends? In the U.S. in recent months, there have been issues with ChatGPT, teenagers becoming emotionally dependent on chatbots leading to all sorts of unhealthy outcomes. Is this happening in China?

I don’t think there is much open discussion about the damage of these AI phenomena. I think part of it is because the overall narrative in China is to promote AI because we want to beat the U.S. as the number one in that technology.

And also, I think people’s tolerance for privacy violation is much higher in China, and people’s desire for chasing the newest technology—chasing the newest, the coolest—they’re much more thirsty.

Even young kids. Every one of my relatives’ children have these fancy watches that have even more functions than the Apple watches.

However, the [AI boyfriend] game that was portrayed in the film is called Love in Deep Space. [Almost 20 percent of the game’s profit comes from the U.S.] So this is a global phenomenon.

I’m really worried. These AI boyfriends, it really takes it to a different level, emotions of human connections. Once they are able to co-opt that, what is going to happen? I’m really deeply worried. It’s not just about data collection. Once they know how to manipulate human connections . . .

A New Global Scene for Independent Chinese Film

Jeremy Goldkorn — Tuesday, November 4, 2025 - 3:37pm

On November 6, the IndieChina Film Festival announced its cancellation because of pressure from authorities on China-based filmmakers and participants.

This November, two unrelated festivals of independent Chinese-language films are taking place outside of China. The CiLENS Berlin Indie Chinese Cinema Week, which runs from November 1 to 9, is now in its fourth year. In New York, the inaugural IndieChina Film Festival is on from November 8 to 15.

It’s a surprisingly positive development. “Many of us attending a conference on Chinese independent cinema in Newcastle in 2023 wondered if we were in some sense officiating over a funeral for that movement,” cinema curator Shelly Kraicer told me when I reached out to see if he felt the same, but these two festivals “suggest we may have been a bit premature.”

There had been a brief flourishing of independent Chinese film festivals and screenings inside China during the early 2000s, which accelerated as cheap, high-quality digital cameras and pirate DVDs of global documentaries and art films became widely available in China. That era ended with the harsher cultural restrictions of the Xi Jinping era: The 11th and final Beijing Independent Film Festival was shut down on its opening day in 2014. There have not been any independent film festivals of any size or international repute in China since then.

Nonetheless, China has a growing number of independent filmmakers who continue to produce documentaries and feature films. They just don’t have many places to show them. There are no art house theaters, and all the independent film festivals are now non-operational. While there are numerous digital channels to show short films, they are highly commercialized, highly censored, and unsuitable for films intended to be shown on a big screen. But perhaps there is hope abroad, in global cities where growing numbers of educated Chinese people are settling.

Zhu Rikun in New York and Echo Xuedan Tang in Berlin, organizers of this November’s film festivals, represent a growing Chinese cultural diaspora. Their festivals, both grassroots affairs without major corporate sponsorship, offer glimpses into contemporary China through films that would otherwise remain unseen.

Echo Xuedan Tang

Tang is a Chengdu native who moved to Berlin in 2021 on a German Chancellor Fellowship. After completing degrees in political science and cultural management in Shanghai, London, and New York, she began making documentary films in Beijing. But “when pandemic stuff started,” she started thinking about possibilities abroad. Now based in Berlin, she founded CiLENS (Chinese Independent Lens) and launched the Indie Chinese Cinema Week in 2022 to bring together her interests in film, feminism, and global social issues.

Zhu Rikun was born in a village in Guangdong province. He studied finance at the prestigious Peking University from 1996 to 2000, but has spent the last quarter of a century working in film. In 2001, he set up Fanhall, a website for exchanging information and networking that was vital to the early growth of indie filmmaking in China. He has directed several films and produced almost 20, mostly documentaries, including The Dossier (2014). In the almost absurdist documentary, independent Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser reads and discusses the government’s secret official dossier on her, which she and Zhu somehow obtained.

Zhu Rikun

Zhu established a well known independent documentary film festival in 2003 and was co-founder and program director of the Beijing Independent Film Festival. But the authorities frowned on film festivals that did not go through official censorship channels. “Every time we were in trouble,” Zhu said. “The government didn’t like it or they gave us some hard time. Eventually both of them were banned.” His frustrations led him to launch the IndieChina Film Festival in New York this year, despite believing that such events should ideally “be based in China, in Beijing, Guangdong, or [a] rural village.” The advantage of doing it in New York, though, aside from lack of censorship, is that he hopes “the audience can realize there are films of this kind from China, that they can be aware that independent cinema is still there, and that they can have some understanding of the current situation of Chinese society.”

Both the Berlin and New York festivals are documentary-heavy, and both organizers suggested documentaries when I asked them to recommend films.

Tang pointed to a major work in the Berlin lineup: Youth: Homecoming (青春: 归, 2024), the third in Wang Bing’s trilogy about migrant workers, shot between 2014 and 2019. Tang sees migration, and issues to do with labor, queer experience, gender politics, and ethnic minorities, as subjects that can draw “a really big crowd” and engage people of different backgrounds and cultures. Tang also highlighted this year’s short film programs, which showcase young filmmakers who take advantage of the form with “the total freedom to show and do whatever they like.”

Zhu mentioned the world premiere of Old Friends from Jiangnan (江南故人, 2024), a film about five octogenarian survivors of a re-education through labor farm in Shaanxi province, who were sent there during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s.

Film has been a key media form for the exploration of LGBTQ identities in China, and both festivals highlight such works. Berlin sees the premiere of Bel Ami (漂亮朋友, 2024), a feature film by Geng Jun: In a small Chinese town, a middle-aged man decides to come out of the closet, as a lesbian couple search for a gay man for a marriage of convenience to get paperwork to have a child. The New York festival has two films by Cui Zi’en, a director, producer, writer, and scholar who, from the 1990s, was a key figure in bringing LGBTQ stories to screens in China. The festival selections are his gay-themed dramas The Old Testament (旧约, 2002) and Night Scene (夜景, 2004).

Another landmark film in 21st century independent Chinese film at the New York festival is Seafood (海鲜, 2001). The director is Zhu Wen, who is also the author of a number of well-regarded novellas and short stories, including the collection I Love Dollars, which has been translated into English. Seafood is a dark film. Its protagonist, Jinzi, is a prostitute working in Beijing who takes a train to the seedy seaside resort town of Baidaihe, where senior Communist Party leaders hold an annual summer retreat. But Jinzi goes there in the middle of winter, planning to commit suicide. A cop intervenes, and then forces her into a “remedial treatment” consisting of rape and a diet of seafood. To say more about the plot would be to reveal spoilers.

Films like this cannot be screened publicly in China. But this year’s film festivals will, according to Shelly Kraicer, “insist that independent Chinese film voices continue to be heard, even—or especially—during this period when their public audiences can only be found outside of China.” These audiences will be found amongst the growing Chinese communities abroad and by an expanding group of non-Chinese who are interested in China, which—like it or not—has become an indispensable nation.

Tang notes the emergence of multiple Chinese cultural initiatives in Berlin over the past five years, including music collectives and pop-up Chinese food stalls. Her and Zhu Rikun’s festivals could become major gathering points for the Sinophone world and the Chinese-curious.

Tang’s and Zhu’s festivals could become major gathering points for the Sinophone world and the Chinese-curious. They’re also great soft power for China as a country. Even if the films do not tell the officially-approved story, anyone watching them is likely to come away with a strong sense of the humanity of the people depicted on the screen, who, like Americans and Germans, live in a country with horrific repression in its past, and a confusing present.

ChinaFile Presents: ‘Made in Ethiopia’

Tuesday, November 4, 2025 - 10:52am

Filmed over four years of intensive interviews and unique access, Made in Ethiopia lifts the curtain on China’s historic but misunderstood impact on Africa, and explores contemporary Ethiopia at a moment of profound crisis. The film throws audiences into two colliding worlds: an industrial juggernaut fueled by profit and progress, and a vanishing countryside where life is still measured by the cycle of the seasons. As the three women’s stories unfold, Made in Ethiopia challenges us to rethink the relationship between tradition and modernity, growth and welfare, and the development of a country and the wellbeing of its people.

Renewable Energy Still Comes at the Cost of Forced Labor. It Needs to Be Stopped.

Sophie Richardson — Friday, October 31, 2025 - 4:10pm

Despite dominating global production, China has a polysilicon problem. Having subsidized and encouraged production of this critical ingredient in solar cells and panels, the country now faces massive oversupply.

‘Mistress Dispeller’

Susan Jakes & Elizabeth Lo — Friday, October 24, 2025 - 3:56pm

The new documentary feature film Mistress Dispeller probes the unraveling and redemption of a marriage at breathtakingly close range. Director Elizbeth Lo follows Teacher Wang, a professional “mistress dispeller,” as she counsels a middle-aged wife undone by her husband’s infidelity and unspools a covert plan to rid them of his lover. The film is currently playing at the IFC Center in New York through October 30. ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes spoke with Lo about how she made the film. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Susan Jakes: How did you come to make this film?

Elizabeth Lo: After making my first feature documentary, Stray, which was set in Turkey and follows the perspective of stray dogs as they wander through Istanbul—that was such a revelatory experience for me to get to know a culture that was so different than my own—I knew that I wanted to set my second feature-length documentary in mainland China. As a Hong Kong citizen, mainland China is both foreign but also really close to my own heritage. I wanted to use the documentary as a way to explore this culture and country that’s so vast and so relevant to my own life. . . I had spent quite a lot of time in mainland China, but documentaries take you into a culture in a way that you can’t experience as just a normal, regular person without a camera.

I thought exploring love would be a really interesting way to get to know the country. And I had re-watched Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, in which [a character played by] Gong Li marries as a fourth wife into a patriarch’s family, and has to navigate the pressures of that.

And I thought it would be really interesting to pose the question of what it is like to be a woman navigating society today, and transpose the spirit of that film to contemporary China. So I was researching mistresses in contemporary China, and that’s how I came across the mistress dispelling phenomenon.

How did you find out about it?

I was researching mistresses in China and I came across articles about mistress schools. . . But then by the time I had asked my producer, Maggie, to look into this, they had all been shut down. But when I asked her to look into mistress dispellers, those actually existed, and there were plenty of them. And I remember at first thinking, you know, this could only be a fiction film when I read about it in the news, because access would be so difficult for a subject matter that’s so enshrouded in shame and secrecy. But Maggie was able to find real mistress dispellers for us to meet in our scouting trip to China, and Teacher Wang [the film’s main character] was the only one who, on day one of the scouting shoot, was able to get us access to film a husband, a wife, and a mistress who are all part of the same case, at its tail end. I was so moved by even the husband’s perspective, because he was crying at this table with Wang, that it really changed the focus of my film. It became much more inclusive, and I wanted to make it about, sort of, how people deal with the pain of being in a marriage, and also figuring out the problems of when love fades or when desire fades. And so that was really the impetus for making the film: To compassionately look at all three angles of a love triangle.

So that couple was not the couple that appears in the film?

No. We ended up following Teacher Wang for three years, hoping the whole time to be able to capture and authentically document a case from beginning to end. We filmed with at least six other couples in those three years who are not in the film. Mr. and Mrs. Li [who appear in the film] came in the third year, and [their story] was filmed over the course of four months. It took us so long to finally get because it’s just really difficult. There were always pieces of the love triangle missing, or people would drop out midway through filming. And we would, of course, respect that decision.

My producer Emma Miller and I were very conscious of how to stay ethical when deception is such a big part of the mistress dispelling process. [Initially] the husband and the mistress couldn’t have known what Teacher Wang’s role was in their lives, and so they had agreed to be in a film just broadly about modern love in China, and that’s what they had agreed to participate in.

Let’s back up a bit. So you first got Teacher Wang to say that she would kind of broker your relationship with her clients?

Actually, to alleviate the burden on her, we initially tried to cast ourselves for potential clients that we could bring to her and say, “Hey, we got their permission to film with them. Can you now fix their problem?” But what we found when we did that was those strangers, you know, wives or mistresses who had no idea who Wang was or her capabilities, they didn’t have the trust that her real clients had for her, and trust and faith in her work is such a big part of her effectiveness. So it just didn’t work. So then we were like, okay, we need to only rely on Wang’s incoming organic pool of clients and see. Out of hundreds of cases, usually it would be a handful who would agree [to be filmed]. And of those handful, it would really depend on the character of those people and whether they could compel you to feel sympathetic to each of their plights.

I guess Mrs. Li knew what you were filming, or understood that you were filming about mistress dispelling?

Yes, but actually by that point, as a backup plan we had filmed so many different other love industries in China, because we weren’t totally sure if we could get access to make a film about an individual story.

What are some other love industries?

We filmed a lot of matchmaking companies. We filmed with dating coaches who help young men. And then we filmed with divorce lawyers, because we thought maybe this would be the end of the process. We also even filmed with BDSM rope play communities in Shanghai. We were looking for textures and tangents around love and desire that might be able to bolster our story. So those were all the different tangents we went on in the event that we would not be able to get as deep access as we hoped to build this Rashomon around a love triangle.

By the time we got to Mr. and Mrs. Li, we had actually filmed with [Mrs. Li’s] little brother who had been a male mistress two years prior to production, and we had filmed with him as he was getting dispelled by Teacher Wang himself. And so two years later, when his older sister comes to him with her problem, he says, I have a great solution for you. You know this film crew are lovely, and then Teacher Wang is also a magician who will make your problem go away. So with that pre-existing vouch of approval and relationship with us through a trusted relative, Mrs. Li was on board.

Why do you think she wanted to be filmed?

We asked her, and it actually appealed to her altruistic side. Teacher Wang said to her, you’re struggling so much in private, and so many women struggle in private with this domestic issue, but if you share your struggle publicly, you may be able to help other families navigate with this situation. You can see her temperament in the film. She’s a brave, strong woman who’s very kind at the end of the day. And that really appealed to her, and I think that’s why she participated.

How did you film Mr. Li (the cheating husband) and his mistress (Feifei) without their knowing what was happening?

We didn’t have contact with them at first, it was Teacher Wang’s business partner who also kind of works in psychology who approached them, separately, and asked whether they would be part of a production that was about love and China—that’s what they [initially] agreed to. And our interactions with the wife, the husband, and the mistress were intentionally kept to a minimum because Wang didn’t want [us] to inadvertently sort of spill the beans to them or reveal too much to them and disrupt her mistress dispelling. At the end of the process, once everybody completely understood what Wang did in their lives, we traveled back to China and showed a cut of the film to each of them separately to sort of get their blessing and offer them the opportunity to reconsent to being a part of the project.

How do you understand why Mr. Li and Feifei were willing to be in the film?

With Mr. Li, I think he felt compelled to because of his wife. He knew that his marriage was struggling. So I think partly to save his family, he felt being a part of this project that his wife wanted to be a part of would help.

But with Feifei, we asked her at the end why she had agreed to be in this, and why she had stuck with it even as the relationship was falling apart. And what she said was so striking to me. She said that she thought that the film was going to be a gift from the husband to her, a document of their love story in which she was the central character. And she kept staying because she wanted to know how their love story would end or continue. She wanted to know what would happen. So I think, on a very deep level—and we don’t know what was said to her off camera by her lover—she didn’t think that she would lose to the 55 year old wife, and so that’s partly why she kept staying and wanted to see it through, because she didn’t believe that the relationship would come to an end.

When we started talking you said you knew you wanted to film in China. Did you think of yourself as making or having made a film that is about China or Chinese society?

People always ask me, could mistress dispelling [work] in the West or, you know, internationally, this business itself? And I’m of two minds. I do think on one hand, infidelity is universal. It’s a human condition. But I do think there is something culturally specific to mistress dispelling and why it thrives in Asia. I think that has to do with this difference between a culture which prioritizes the collective over the individual, the greater good of the family and keeping the family, preserving the family unit, versus in the West, a more individualistic culture where pursuit of your own personal happiness is paramount.

And that’s why mistress dispelling works, because in the West, I think if you found out your spouse was cheating on you, divorce would be almost the first resort. Actually a divorce lawyer said to me, “this plays like science fiction. I cannot believe that these scenes are taking place.” And also, a lot of men in the West will ask me, “why did the husband choose to stay? I don’t understand.” Whereas in Asia, it was never a question in the husband’s mind that he would leave his wife, because even if having a mistress is more socially acceptable, leaving your wife would make you human scum.

And yet divorce rates in China have risen dramatically in recent decades.

I think mistress dispelling is sort of a symptom and a response to enduring patriarchy. But also it’s a way that women, contradictorily, are empowering themselves to reassert fidelity within their own homes and reassert control in their families and demand fidelity. And I also think the way that at least Teacher Wang goes about solving a case and approaches conflict resolution does feel Asian to me in that it’s not directly confrontational, it’s very indirect, and it it’s trying to seek a harmony where everything is sort of simmering under the surface, but you’re allowing every person in the conflict to emerge unscathed.

Maybe one could say that it’s China, how innovation and the entrepreneurial nature of this industry collide with pragmatism and preservation of family in a way that allows the mistress dispelling phenomenon to thrive there. But I think as ethically murky and dubious as this profession can be, that there is something redeeming and beautiful about resolving a conflict in this way, in which nobody’s screaming. The cost is that there’s no accountability and no confrontation ever. But I do think there’s something really beautiful about an alternate mode of conflict resolution. I don’t know if that’s specific to China. The reason why I was drawn to this subject matter was not because it represented China, necessarily, but that I knew as a Hong Kong citizen to go and make a film in China in this day and age where there’s so much anti-Chinese sentiment in the West that I wanted to pursue subject matter that wasn’t going to further alienate China from Western audiences.

And so few documentaries that have gotten exposure in the West have explored just middle-class, ordinary people’s domestic lives in contemporary China. A love story involves universal emotions, and that was part of why I was drawn to this subject matter, as a person who is very conscious of what stories we tell that come out of China, that are consumed in the West, and what that does to the psyche in the West about China. So to me, the story of love and betrayal—even though there’s a strange profession that is handling it in a slightly different way than it would be handled in the West at the heart of it—these people, what they’re going through, it’s super universal. And that’s what drew me.

Remembering Jerome A. Cohen

Thomas Kellogg, Teng Biao & more — Friday, October 10, 2025 - 9:51am

Jerome Alan Cohen (July 1, 1930 – September 22, 2025) was a renowned American lawyer who was one of the foremost foreign scholars of Chinese law. After the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and the U.S. he became the first American lawyer to practice in China. He was not only the reigning authority on the subject but the beloved mentor and champion of generations of Chinese lawyers, scholars, and activists.

A Surrogacy Silk Road: Chinese Parents Head West for Babies

Emma Belmonte — Friday, October 3, 2025 - 12:43pm

Georgia has become an increasingly popular destination for Chinese visitors. The number of visits nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, with more than 88,500 visits last year. Yet leisure tourism does not account for the infant-filled flights back to China. Rather, it seems more likely the tiny passengers were the reason many Chinese visitors had traveled to Georgia in the first place. The international surrogacy market has boomed in the region, where it has come to be considered a “gold mine” according to a recent publication by the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS). Since war broke out in 2022 between Russia and Ukraine—the former regional leaders of the market—and Russia banned foreigners from accessing its commercial surrogacy market later that year, prospective parents have had to turn to new destinations in the region. The popularity of international surrogacy services in Post-Soviet states, especially in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, has been on the rise.

Chips and Soybeans

Dexter Tiff Roberts, Wendy Cutler & more — Tuesday, September 30, 2025 - 11:15am

American and Chinese officials announced on September 15 that they had reached a “framework agreement” on the future of TikTok. On September 25, Trump signed an executive order approving the framework agreement for the TikTok deal, although Chinese communications on it have been much more vague. And whatever happens with TikTok, there are many other tensions that remain unresolved.

China’s Birth Crisis Is a Crisis of Faith in the Future

Emma Zang — Thursday, September 18, 2025 - 1:32pm

In recent years, the government has offered tax breaks, housing incentives, and fertility treatment coverage to encourage family formation. But these measures are unlikely to work. China’s birth rate has fallen from 2.5 births per woman in 1990 to just 1 birth per woman in 2023. The country’s declining birth rate is not only an economic problem but a cultural one. For many young people, the real barrier is not the cost of raising children. Rather, it is the conviction that parenthood no longer makes sense in a future that feels uncertain and unworthy of investment. Unless policies address this deeper malaise, subsidies and bonuses will do little to stem the decline.

Remembering Tess Johnston, Chronicler of ‘Old Shanghai’

Tina Kanagaratnam — Tuesday, September 16, 2025 - 11:14am

“I had never seen anything like Shanghai in 1981,” said Tess Johnston, describing her impression of the city when she first arrived. “I had never been to a foreign country that looked so utterly and completely Western. It was perfectly preserved, a cross between Warsaw in 1938 and Calcutta, a totally Western city with an Asian population. It was a scruffy showcase of Western architecture—and it was absolutely wonderful.” Tess, who died this week at 93, had arrived in September 1981 with the U.S. Foreign Service to work at the U.S. Consulate.

Is This a New World Order?

Farwa Aamer, Katie Stallard & more — Saturday, September 6, 2025 - 9:26am

From August 31 to September 1, China hosted twenty foreign leaders in Tianjin for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, the biggest meeting since the formation of the security group in 2002. Group photos of all the attendees and video and photos of Xi Jinping enjoying moments of bonhomie with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “were not accidental but deliberate diplomatic theatre, a spectacle that will make Trump squirm” according to India’s Economic Times. Then, on September 3, Putin, Kim Jong-un, and leaders from 24 other countries, mostly Asian, joined Xi Jinping to watch the 80th anniversary Victory Day parade commemorating the end of World War II, or what Beijing calls “the Victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.” What was the significance of these encounters in Beijing and Tianjin? Was it mainly about optics, a reminder that China has friends and advanced weapons? Or did it signal a more substantive shift in geopolitical alignment or strategy?

“China’s Vulnerability Paradox”

Pascale Massot & Paul French — Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 11:54am

China’s appetite for critical minerals, fossil fuel, timber, and other commodities is the subject of countless news articles and has created anxiety in capital cities around the world. The dominant narrative is one of concern over Beijing’s dominance of global supply chains. Yet while the country clearly exhibits strengths as a commodity superpower, it also suffers from important vulnerabilities. A new book by political economist Pascale Massot, China’s Vulnerability Paradox: How the World’s Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets, examines this paradox, and is the subject of this Q&A by author Paul French.

Paul French: Pascale, can you explain for us succinctly China’s “vulnerability paradox” when it comes to commodities?

Pascale Massot: China’s “vulnerability paradox” refers to the tension between China’s market size and its (actual or perceived) market power. As I was conducting interviews for the book with industry and government insiders in China, it struck me that the perception of China’s power in the West was not necessarily shared by commodity market participants in China. This is one of the puzzles I seek to elucidate in the book.

This “vulnerability paradox,” or how a country can be the largest player in a market and yet feel vulnerable, is, I suggest, the result of a few interrelated dynamics. One of them is the fact that China remains heavily import-dependent for most raw metals and minerals (rare earths and a few other critical minerals are the exception). China’s current dominance of global supply chains is in the refining and processing segments.

There is another way in which China has experienced vulnerability vis-à-vis global commodity markets over the past decades, which I label “market vulnerability,” referring to the market power differentials between domestic and global market stakeholders. Given China’s industrial and development history, the political economy of certain domestic Chinese markets is particularly fragmented—here iron ore comes to mind. China is home to thousands of iron ore mining and steel firms and has consistently missed its own consolidation targets. At the turn of the century, the top four Chinese steel producers were responsible for around 30 percent of domestic production, compared to over 70 percent for the top three Japanese steel makers, and over 500 Chinese firms were importing iron ore. In 2020, the top four Chinese steel producers were responsible for less than a quarter of domestic production, whereas the top two Japanese firms were responsible for over 80 percent of domestic production. High fragmentation has led to domestic difficulties in China, for sure, but here what interests me is the negative impact on China’s capacity to coordinate its procurement behavior internationally. To put it plainly, it is more difficult to coordinate import strategies among a handful of large importers, like Japan did for decades, than it is to do so among hundreds of firms, going from medium-size to larger importers, as was the case for China. In fact, I was able to document in my book the extent to which Chinese iron ore importers ignored or actively skirted coordination attempts by the central government in the late 2000s. Adding to this fragmentation was the fact that the global iron ore exporters are very concentrated (four companies are responsible for 70 percent of global iron ore exports). So you have a combination of China’s domestic market fragmentation and the concentrated nature of the global iron ore producers, and this resulted in a position of market vulnerability that was particularly sharp for China in this case.

I don’t want to suggest that China is experiencing only vulnerabilities in regard to global commodities. In fact, China is in a position of strength when it comes to the production of some commodities such as rare earths or graphite, and quite dominant in the refining and processing of a number of others as well. Rather, I want to help us understand where the current situation comes from. First, China’s current position of dominance in the global value chains for many critical minerals is uneven, both across commodities and across the various supply chains. By this I mean that China’s dominance or vulnerability modulates (goes up or down) along the supply chain. It can be vulnerable to imports of raw commodities, then dominate the refining and processing segments, then dominate some of the product creation/research/innovation space but be dependent on the West in some areas. Then it may dominate the manufacturing space, but be vulnerable to export acceptability at the very end of the supply chain, as it faces pushback from a growing number of countries internationally. These patterns are not the same for every metal and mineral. Rare earths, germanium, or copper supply chains shake out differently. Second, China’s overall approach to commodities procurement is directly linked to its experience of import vulnerabilities over the past decades. We have to remember that China’s deep concerns about import dependence for food, energy, and resources go back to the Mao era and even prior to that. This has led to a more assertive set of commodity procurement policies over the years. In the West, the dominant paradigm until recently was a market-led one. Only since the pandemic have we seen a resurgence of economic security narratives regarding China’s dominance of critical minerals supply chains.

You also talk about a second paradox—that China’s rise in consumption (using the example of iron ore) was “too fast for its own good.” Usually, the story of rapid growth in China is presented as a good one, beneficial for the country, so why was this growth problematic?

China’s rise was in some ways too fast for its own good. There were growing pains that resulted from the speed and amplitude of China’s growth over the past decades. At the turn of the 21st century, global commodity supply was squeezed by China’s rapid consumption rise. The scale and speed of China’s growth in resource consumption was nothing the world had ever seen, and it took many seasoned market participants by surprise. This led, in part, to the commodities supercycle of 2007-2008, in which prices rose rapidly in the leadoff to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Commodity prices have continued to experience a high level of volatility in subsequent years, most recently illustrated by the spike in lithium carbonate prices which rose above $70,000 in 2022 and dipped below $10,000 in early 2025.

The first decade of the century presented unique difficulties for China. There can be certain advantages to relative technological “backwardness” for developing countries that allow for leaping over technological stages. However, this was not the case for the commodities that China needed, especially for legacy metals and minerals. First, the best international mining deposits, with the highest grades and easier logistical access, had already been discovered and were owned by large mining conglomerates by the time of China’s emergence. This pushed China into developing deposits that were not economically efficient, often in politically unstable countries. Many Chinese-backed projects floundered over the past decades, for a variety of reasons. One example is the Simandou iron ore project in Guinea, which China became involved in in 2010. It encountered decades of setbacks and has yet to ship a single ton of iron ore.

Aside from the difficulty of securing mining resources, at the turn of the century China faced commodity markets that were firmly embedded in Western institutional systems, including the U.S. dollar, and price-setting mechanisms and commodity exchanges that were located in the West, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the London Metals Exchange (which Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing acquired in 2012). Chinese commodity market stakeholders entered an arena that was already occupied by mining giants, and dominated by Western market institutions.

During the course of the interviews I conducted for the book, these issues came back often enough that I had to stop and reflect about them. I think this taps into a reality that is shared broadly across developing countries. The extractive resource industry operates under extraordinary levels of industry concentration, and a difficult history of exploitation by Western powers, which we have to consider carefully as we think about China’s evolving role in global commodity markets—and how the West should respond.

China’s growth was in large part predicated on its ability to acquire vast amounts of commodities (inputs) to drive manufacturing, infrastructure development, and energy production. Yet to achieve this China had to deal with a relatively small number of global mining giants. This had led to some tricky, and sometimes adversarial, negotiations over the years, not always to China’s benefit. How well do you think Beijing has handled this situation?

It has varied. In the book, I devote a chapter to the iron ore market, and I do this in three parts. First, I do a deep dive into the 2010 fall of the iron ore benchmark pricing system, which consisted of annual, closed-door negotiations between iron ore importers and global producers for a price that remained valid for the global market that year. Then I study some of the parallel developments in the iron ore shipping sector. I also conduct a historical comparison with Japan’s emergence as the number one consumer of iron ore 50 years earlier.

When China replaced Japan as the lead benchmark pricing negotiator in 2006, only three years after becoming the world’s number one consumer of iron ore, it took a hard stance against the “Big Three” global iron ore producers (Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, and Vale) in the annual benchmark negotiations, and tried to negotiate markdowns. In 2009, while the negotiations were ongoing, the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA) demanded that its members (and iron ore import license holders) refrain from buying on the global iron ore market. However, CISA’s strategy backfired. A multitude of small- and medium-sized Chinese firms ignored the request and purchased iron ore on the global market through individual “spot” contracts, delivered to China by BHP Billiton, quickly followed by Vale and then Rio Tinto.

Only three years after China had become the world’s top iron ore consumer, the behavior of its iron ore importers disrupted a decades-old, stable pricing system that had been established by Japanese buyers. The iron ore benchmark pricing system was China’s to lose. The Chinese position of market vulnerability and its lack of coordination of procurement behavior, combined with the decisions of key global iron ore producers, led to this outcome. The fall of the iron ore benchmark is a fascinating case, because the outcome is the opposite of what the most powerful Chinese stakeholders wanted.

Diagnosing this exact lacuna—the lack of domestic coordination—in 2022 the Chinese government announced the creation of the China Mineral Resources Group, a $3 billion procurement giant whose mission explicitly includes the coordination of the various Chinese iron ore market stakeholders at the interface with global markets. China’s experience in the iron ore market may have informed its policy decisions in the rare earths space, including the consolidation of the industry and the creation of the China Rare Earth Group in 2021.

One lesson is that we cannot assume that China’s largest impacts internationally would be the result of a position of strength, whereas a position of weakness would lead China to be a “rule-taker” or to seamlessly integrate into international markets. The relationship between Chinese domestic dynamics and institutional change at the global level is more complex. Given China’s size, vulnerability and strength can both create a large global impact.

You give a good history of the development of benchmark pricing in commodities, using Japan’s economic emergence as an example. How has China’s supremacy in the market as a customer changed international pricing in sectors like iron ore, uranium, potash, etc. in the last few decades?

As a comparativist, I pay attention to variation across cases. I coin a phrase in the book to describe this variation: China is a heterogenous power. I think it is important to understand why there is concurrent variation in Chinese behavior and impacts at the international level. This is more intuitively recognized across different issue areas (say climate policy vs. defense policy), but it also happens within the same issue-area, in this case commodities procurement.

As I touched on earlier, Chinese market stakeholders’ fragmented behavior in the iron ore market led to the fall of a decades-old pricing regime. This was the very regime that Japanese iron ore importers had spearheaded decades earlier. At the time, Japanese iron ore importers acted as part of a coordinated purchasing group, while Japanese financiers invested upstream in the mining industry to guarantee adequate supply. Chinese importers were not able to maintain this regime in the iron ore case, even though this was very much the wish of the leading Chinese state-owned enterprises and CISA.

In the potash market, however, the benchmark system survives to this day. China is the lead benchmark price negotiator, despite the fact that the global potash market had many similarities with the global iron ore market when China emerged as the number one consumer. This derives from a more evenly balanced position of market power between Chinese domestic and global potash market stakeholders. It turns out that Chinese potash importers are much more concentrated and better coordinated than their iron ore counterparts. Indeed, two key state-owned entities control close to half of all imports and negotiate their import strategy carefully as part of a leading group. This has led to more stability in the international potash pricing regime.

If the Chinese importers continue, with the support of the government, to coordinate their behavior and extract rents from other Chinese fertilizer market players, such as distributors and fertilizer manufacturers, the benchmarking system could survive a while longer. If they fail, we could see the fall of the relevance of benchmark negotiations as price signals, and the rise of the dominance of spot pricing.

Interestingly, Brazil’s rise as a significant consumer of potash (it now is responsible for over 20 percent of global potash imports) and the fragmentation of its domestic industry have weakened the benchmark system and the influence of Chinese importers. Just as in the iron ore market, the gradual dissolution of the potash benchmark pricing regime is the result of the emergence of a fragmented consumer, facing oligopolistic global producers, and occurring despite contrary preferences from the largest Chinese importers.

Arguably, we are now seeing China’s economy slowing—manufacturing as well as infrastructure/property development and perhaps power consumption. How will this affect China’s commodity hunger and how does that affect its “vulnerability paradoxes”?

I’m not in the business of predicting Chinese commodities consumption trends, but I would just say that while some legacy commodities such as iron ore and coal are unlikely to see as big a rise in demand as the one we have seen at the turn of the 21st century, absolute levels of consumption will remain very high. Just to give a sense of the scale here, China has gone from importing around 1 percent of global iron ore exports in the 1970s to importing over 65 percent of global iron ore exports in the 2020s. The end products driving domestic demand for steel are shifting in China, and as a result it has sought to find overseas sources of demand to compensate. This means that China remains the number one steel producer with over 50 percent of global production even despite decreasing domestic consumption, and will remain the dominant global actor for the foreseeable future. China’s share of copper ores and concentrates (a more processed form of copper, ready for smelting) imports is also at 65 percent currently.

Of course, in terms of commodities needed for the green transition and growing need for energy given the expansion of AI, worldwide demand is projected to grow rapidly. Here, China’s share of global consumption is not only dependent on China’s domestic needs, but also on the world’s continued reliance on China for refined commodities and manufactured products, which has opened new vulnerabilities.

It may be that the Chinese government, understandably, makes decisions based on a predominantly domestic reading of the economy. However, many stakeholders central to China’s continued economic development sit outside of China’s borders now, whether China likes it or not. At the same time, the “open markets” assumptions that had underpinned global economic exchange over the past decades are being profoundly disrupted. China now needs to address concerns about the impact of its exports on the job markets of countries far away from its borders, as part of its domestic economic policymaking. This is a tough spot for China, as Xi Jinping had specifically decided to solve some of China’s domestic economic issues (post-COVID economic recovery, real estate market restructuring, self-reliance agenda) via a huge ramp-up in manufacturing exports.

Every economy that has a relationship with the global economy has vulnerabilities. What we are seeing right now is the evolution of China’s—and other countries’—vulnerabilities over time. A more granular understanding of both could help better guide an economic resilience agenda, in an age of continued global interactions.

Where is all this going? A slowing China maybe, a changing international trade regime perhaps, a move away from non-renewables hopefully? What do you think the future holds, and where does that leave China in terms of vulnerability?

We have entered a different era in the relationship between China and the global economy. The reform and opening-up era, where the ramping up of China’s economic interdependence with the rest of the world was seen as a net positive, especially in the West, ended sometime in the 2010s. A few years of escalating tensions with the U.S., starting in 2017 and continuing under President Joe Biden, until the return of President Donald Trump in 2025, saw the Chinese leadership react with what was seen by many as relative measure, at least in the economic sector. The rare earths export control measures announced by China in April 2025, and the subsequent panic that ensued around the world, signaled a change in the leadership’s willingness to use critical minerals and associated technologies as tools of economic leverage. There remains high uncertainty regarding how the U.S.-China relationship may evolve over the next few years. One of the many unfortunate impacts of escalating distrust and strategic tensions across the Pacific is that this may lead to entrenched positions and hubris, lowering the likelihood of needed structural readjustments. We have not arrived at a place where a new “grand bargain” that would recalibrate China’s economic relationship with the rest of the world can be found—yet it is needed.

At the same time, China’s economy is so large and so globally entwined that domestic Chinese dynamics have, as a result, an impact on global markets, whether China intends them to do so or not. This is not only true for commodities, including critical minerals, but also for a range of advanced manufactured products, technologies, and, more broadly, domestic economic policy decisions, investment, standards, and even meta narratives.

This for me demonstrates the importance of studying the impact of China on global markets from the perspective of deep resonance dynamics. The resurgence of discussion about economic security and self-reliance around the world comes from the perceptions of each other’s actions, like a traditional security dilemma, but it also stems from profound domestic realities—fractures and failures in both sides’ domestic systems of political economy, which are, incidentally, not entirely unrelated to each other.

Another lesson I draw from this book is the importance of unintended consequences and second-order effects. The impacts of China’s rise on the economies of other countries vary only in part according to the preferences of the Chinese Communist Party, state, and private actors. In the case of resource security and supply chain resilience, there are many interacting effects and powerful drivers at play. This means, on the one hand, that we cannot underestimate the structural forces that have taken us to where we are today. In the case of critical minerals today, it also means that given the complex nature of global supply chains, their excessive securitization and weaponization would be detrimental to global resilience and supply security. In other words, while recalibration is clearly needed, we should, on the one hand, encourage the development of realistic and specific critical mineral supply chain resilience goals and, on the other, realize that these should be balanced with investments in bolstering trust, the elaboration of credible reassurances, and a commitment to stability, transparency, and continued open access for most metals and minerals.

How Much Has Trump Changed His Position on China?

James McGregor, Wendy Cutler & more — Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 11:09am

U.S. President Donald Trump came into office with tough talk on China, including promises to enact huge tariffs on China and erect a new trade regime, “aggressive new restrictions” on Chinese ownership of American land, an end to fentanyl trafficking, and more. Now the White House seems to be softening its tone, and moderating its actions against Beijing. How significantly has the Trump administration changed its positioning on China? Has the President “gone soft”? And, if so, what are the consequences likely to be?

What Did the EU-China 50th Anniversary Summit Achieve?

Philippe Le Corre, Zichen Wang & more — Thursday, July 31, 2025 - 11:42am

A European Union-China Summit took place in Beijing on July 24, 2025, marking the 50th anniversary of EU-China diplomatic relations. European Council President António Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang. What are the implications for trade and security, and for how Europe has to balance its risks and needs between China, Russia, and the U.S.? Was the summit an inconsequential formality? Or if not, how are its outcomes likely to shape the EU-China relationship going forward?

China’s Vulnerability to International Pressure on Human Rights Practices

Kenneth Roth — Tuesday, July 29, 2025 - 9:28am

The lessons I draw from these efforts is that despite the Chinese government’s economic clout and its willingness to retaliate against those who dare to spotlight its repression, Beijing remains vulnerable to international censure. As governments end their infatuation with the Chinese market and find safety in numbers from Beijing’s retaliation, the prospect of a formal U.N. condemnation of the Chinese government’s repression—Beijing’s nightmare—may come to pass. That Beijing continues to care about its international reputation is perhaps the most important opportunity that the human rights community has to mitigate Beijing’s repression.

Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

Zha Jianying — Monday, July 21, 2025 - 10:14am

China is a powerful nation now. Decades of fast GDP growth. The second largest economy in the world. Yet another “New Era” has been declared by yet another strong and wise leader (Mao Zedong used the phrase “New Era” as early as 1940). The official drumbeat about “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”—Xi Jinping’s version of “Make China Great Again”—has been deafening. The West is declining. The East is rising. The United States is stumbling. China is moving to “center stage,” says Xi. Our national team is winning. Look ahead, be positive, cheer our captain and our team. Greater victory is in sight. History is on our side.

The Dalai Lama’s Succession

Ian Johnson, Isabel Hilton & more — Saturday, July 5, 2025 - 7:43am

How might the battle over succession play out over the coming months? If the Dalai Lama announces a successor, how will Beijing respond? How robust is the institutional framework for maintaining legitimacy without the Chinese government’s recognition, and what are its potential vulnerabilities? What are the ramifications for China’s relationship with India, which hosts the Tibetan government-in-exile? How might other countries respond to Beijing?

Balancing What Can Be Said with What Can Only Be Implied

Shelly Kraicer — Thursday, July 3, 2025 - 10:29am

The young Uyghur filmmaker Ikram Nurmehmet is now in a Chinese prison for “actively participating in terrorist activities.” He was likely targeted because he had studied in Turkey between 2010 and 2016. It is always difficult for what China calls “ethnic minority” (i.e. non-Han Chinese) filmmakers to make the films they want to make inside China, where review by the state Film Administration is mandatory for all. What may be surprising is that filmmakers from Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang have succeeded in making important and eloquent works of cinema that grapple, at least indirectly, with the particular situations of their communities in China, despite the constraints under which they work.

How the Internet Works, and How China Censors It

Laura Edelson & Jessica Batke — Monday, June 30, 2025 - 10:53am

Computer scientist Laura Edelson and China researcher Jessica Batke discuss some of what they learned over the course of their 18-month investigation into China's online censorship system. They break down some of the basic functions of the internet, how China has constructed a censorship system that connects to, but is separate from, the rest of the internet, and how that censorship system impacts the rest of the world.

ChinaFile Presents: ‘How to Have an American Baby’

Leslie Tai & Susan Jakes — Monday, June 30, 2025 - 9:45am

Following a screening of How to Have an American Baby at Asia Society on June 25, filmmaker Leslie Tai joined ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief Susan Jakes to talk about the film and her process of making of it. The film reveals the hidden world of Chinese birth tourism through intimate, interwoven stories of the people shaped by it.

The Locknet: How China Controls Its Internet and Why It Matters

Jessica Batke & Laura Edelson — Monday, June 30, 2025 - 7:12am

Most people know that China censors its internet. They’ve probably even heard of the “Great Firewall,” the clever moniker popularly used to describe that censorship. But despite its increasing impact on our online lives, most people outside China don’t understand how this information control system really works. What does it consist of? How effective is it? What is its ultimate purpose? And how much does it alter the internet in the rest of the world?

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

Yangyang Cheng — Friday, June 20, 2025 - 12:35pm

More than the chronology of one company, House of Huawei is partly a family biography of Ren and his eldest daughter Meng Wanzhou, and partly a geopolitical thriller about two superpowers and the people and places caught in between.

The Making of an American Baby

Leslie Tai & Susan Jakes — Friday, June 20, 2025 - 10:31am

On June 25, ChinaFile will screen Leslie Tai’s documentary film How to Have an American Baby, which explores the industry built to promote Chinese women traveling to the U.S. to give birth to children so that they can be American citizens. ChinaFile’s editor-in-chief, Susan Jakes, spoke to Tai about the film last year. The following is an edited excerpt of their conversation.

Susan Jakes: How did you come to make a film on the subject of Chinese birth tourism in California?

Leslie Tai: After living in China for several years and working with the documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, I came back to the U.S. in 2011 for grad school in documentary film at Stanford. Having spent six years in China during a kind of golden era, I then came back and found myself living in my mother’s house in Cupertino. It’s at the top of the list of U.S. townships or cities with the largest Chinese immigrant populations. And upon my return, I was struck by all these smells and accents and flavors from China that were suddenly here. The old-school Chinese immigrant community that I grew up with in San Francisco was mostly from Hong Kong and Taiwan. I became fascinated by the people who made it over and what they were doing here. There was all of this real estate being snapped up by Chinese investors. At some point, there was a bus that went around Silicon Valley for Chinese buyers of homes. It was a boom.

I was very clear that I wanted to do something about Chinese tourists. We were seeing a lot of news coverage treating Chinese tourists like a plague of locusts, descending upon the U.S., spending their money. I felt I needed to do something about new Chinese wealth coming to America and treating America like a commodity, flipping the script in a way that would make your average American a little uncomfortable, when it’s just a fact of a globalized world. I was very interested in the power dynamic reversal of “New China,” “Rising China,” and the fact that now the U.S. and China are competing superpowers, maybe. So I wanted to make something that sort of satirically leaned into this idea of a voracious Chinese consumer coming and consuming what America has to offer and framing it in a way where it’s like, “What could be more American?” I didn’t want to shy away from something considered stereotypical or taboo.

And then one day, a woman I’d known in Beijing, a very intelligent young woman, also a filmmaker who harbored dreams of moving to Germany, showed up. She was dating someone who had means. She didn’t tell me why she was here; I just assumed she was here for her art. Then we finally had a video chat and she had this big round belly that she was oiling up in front of the screen. She was like, “Oh, I’m here to have an American baby.” I said, “What does that mean?” And she said, “You know, my baby’s gonna be born here and they’ll be American.” I was like, “Oh my God, that’s a great idea.”

Why did she think it was a great idea?

Well, again, she had this ambition to leave China. I felt she was very open-minded and hungry for a Western-style understanding of the world. I interpreted that as: she’s trying to immigrate. She’s trying to find a way to leave China. But it had never occurred to me that you could do it in this way. It’s a very long game. She was the one who told me that when the kid turns 21, they can turn around and sponsor their immediate family members to have Green Cards.

And through her you came to understand more about the structures supporting this project?

She stayed in what was called a minsu, kind of like an Airbnb, but with like 14 people living in one house. There were many bedrooms. As soon as I arrived, I was just shocked at how, on the outside, it looked like you were in this nondescript all-American suburban tract housing. And then behind closed doors, all these people were living together trying to have American babies. There was all this drama happening among people living in such close quarters. We took a walk around the hilltop where she was staying, and she would point out, “Oh, this house and that house; this one’s a maternity hotel, and that one’s a maternity hotel. And this one, they’re the same boss. Those two are rivals.” And my mind just exploded into a billion pieces. I immediately saw, in my mind’s eye, all of these women behind closed doors, sequestered in a suburban Los Angeles hilltop that no one’s ever heard of, incubating their babies—and also the destinies of entire families. In that moment, I thought, “Okay, we’re making a film, and it’s going to be kaleidoscopic, or web-like. I don’t want to follow one or two people, I want to show all these people involved.

I wasn’t sure that the pregnant women were the ones I should follow at first; they were obviously in a vulnerable state. And I couldn’t imagine, at the time, anyone who would want to share their experience with me. I was more interested, actually, in the whole system, the structure of this underground economy–and all of the “ordinary nobodies” inhabiting the nooks and crannies of this human supply chain. I wanted to know about them. I wanted to go in and film slices of life with people in some kind of decisive moment. Instead of just trying to follow a family or two and over-explain their motivations, I wanted to film moments of various people who were embedded in the invisible web of this industry. Especially the ones who were just trying to survive. I was more interested in this microcosm or cross section of Chinese society in America, who were all, in some way, battling with their own disappointment with what they thought the American Dream was.

Is China About to Produce the Next ‘Sputnik Moment’?

Rui Ma, Lizzi C. Lee & more — Monday, June 16, 2025 - 4:14pm

Both private sector players and the Chinese government are investing huge amounts of money and throwing top-tier engineering talent at areas such as quantum computing, biotech and health sciences, AI, cryptography, materials science, flying cars, aerospace, nuclear fusion, and other new forms of energy. What is the most probable future Sputnik moment? What technologies or sectors should we watch to keep track of Chinese innovation? And where is there more hype than substance?

Li Qiang’s Quiet Rise

Neil Thomas — Wednesday, June 4, 2025 - 12:31pm

While many people assume Chinese politics has been a one-man show since Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012, the truth is more complicated. Recent signals suggest a subtle shift in power dynamics. Although Xi has clearly consolidated his authority as China’s paramount leader, he now appears to be delegating key aspects of governance—particularly in economic policymaking—to his deputy, Premier Li Qiang.

Chinese Activists Are in Shock over Cuts to U.S. Human Rights Programs

Thomas Kellogg — Friday, May 30, 2025 - 2:38pm

On April 22, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a wide-ranging reorganization of the State Department. Though the details of the restructuring have yet to be published, it seems clear that human rights will be downgraded, and a number of staff positions related to human rights and other key thematic concerns will be cut. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) was singled out for particular scorn by Secretary Rubio: He falsely labeled it a “platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas,” and claimed that it pursued “radical causes at taxpayer expense.”

How Will the Trump Presidency Change EU-China Relations?

Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Frans-Paul van der Putten & more — Monday, May 12, 2025 - 3:31am

Over the past few years, European countries have started to line up with the United States on China policy. But now, as Donald Trump destroys the trust European countries had in America, China is stepping up, promising stability and consistency, if nothing else. Can European countries maintain a lasting political and economic relationship with China? Are we facing a global decoupling from the U.S. and a strengthening of ties or recoupling with China?

The Forgotten ‘Jeep Babies’ of China

Jack Neubauer — Thursday, May 8, 2025 - 10:02am

The Adoption Plan: China and the Remaking of Global Humanitarianism tells the story of how the cause of saving children in China ignited a new global humanitarian imagination and precipitated a transnational struggle for control over the vast quantities of aid that flowed into China on their behalf. In this excerpt, I look at the mixed-race children of Chinese women and U.S. soldiers in post-WWII China. Referred to as “jeep babies,” the fate of these children briefly became a cause célèbre in Chinese society in the months following the end of the war. By 1947, all public discussion of jeep babies had abruptly ceased, and they have since been completely forgotten to history: my research did not reveal a single mention of them in Chinese or English since 1947.

Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

Zha Jianying — Thursday, May 1, 2025 - 10:42am

19.

My little uncle Lusheng’s youngest son, Congo (thus nicknamed, in those less-informed times, because he was born in 1964 with very dark skin), told me another revealing detail.

Cautioning His Students to Stay Quiet, A Scholar of China Hears Echoes of Its Past in America's Present

Michael Berry — Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 4:12pm

For several generations now, the overriding philosophy of life for many Chinese intellectuals and average citizens has been “mingzhe baoshen,” (明哲保身) which dictionaries define as “a wise man looks after his own hide” or “put one’s own safety before matters of principle” but can be also be rendered more colloquially as “keep your head down, mouth shut, and stay out of trouble.” After decades of political movements that have targeted intellectuals and citizens for speaking out, alternately resulting in criticisms, attacks, imprisonment, re-education, and other forms of persecution, most Chinese people have learned that there is no benefit to protesting, or speaking “truth to power.”

ChinaFile Presents: ‘The Party’s Interests Come First’

Joseph Torigian & Jeremy Goldkorn — Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 7:09am

Joseph Torigian discusses the life of Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, and how his legacy shapes the worldview of one of the world’s most powerful leaders today. Torigian’s new book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, examines the elder Xi’s role as a revolutionary and early leader in the Chinese Communist Party. The book, due to be published in June, is the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun.

Is Donkey Business Worth It for Pakistan?

Akbar Notezai — Wednesday, April 16, 2025 - 4:30pm

Every Friday, at an open air market in the outskirts of Quetta, the mile-high capital of Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, locals gather to buy and sell donkeys. For generations, these animals have been the primary means of transporting goods and people. Donkey carts have remained a popular form of transportation for Pakistan’s poorest people, even as motorbikes, cars, trucks, and buses have clogged up the streets of Pakistani cities. Now there’s a new buyer for Quetta’s donkeys—and it’s not the men who drive donkey carts.

What Even Is Trump’s China Strategy?

Wendy Cutler, Michael Hirson & more — Tuesday, April 8, 2025 - 11:39am

When it comes to China, there are several different factions pushing the Trump Administration in different directions: MAGA nationalists who favor economic, cultural, and possibly military warfare against China; more old-fashioned Republicans who simply distrust the Chinese Communist Party; and the tech elite, especially Trump advisor Elon Musk, who has huge investments in China and doesn’t seem to want cross-Pacific tensions. Trump himself has not said much about China since January 20, but he has taken several steps towards a trade war with China:

Three Potential Pitfalls of Trump’s Approach to China

Ali Wyne — Tuesday, April 8, 2025 - 11:12am

Many observers argue that the first Trump administration played an important role in consolidating a bipartisan U.S. “consensus” on China, the core element of which is a judgment that Beijing is Washington’s foremost strategic competitor. Documents such as the 2017 national security strategy and speeches by prominent officials—most notably one by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in July 2020—argued that erstwhile China policy had failed, framed China in explicitly adversarial terms, and depicted Chinese President Xi Jinping as a Marxist-Leninist autocrat with pretensions to global hegemony. Ironically, though, the most prominent dissenter from this putative understanding may well be the individual whom one might expect to be its strongest exponent: the past and current U.S. president, Donald Trump.

ChinaFile Presents: Shifting Terrain in U.S.-China Relations, Xi Jinping’s Vision for China’s Future

Julian B. Gewirtz & Susan Jakes — Monday, April 7, 2025 - 2:07pm

On March 11, ChinaFile and the Center for China Analysis (CCA) hosted a conversation between Julian Gewirtz, a historian, China expert, and former senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council under President Joe Biden, and ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief and CCA Senior Fellow Susan Jakes, about the future landscape of U.S.-China relations under the new U.S. administration. They discussed the Trump administration’s plans to overturn the norms and institutions that have underpinned U.S. foreign policy for decades and helped prevent a fraught relationship from escalating into armed conflict, and how these plans could influence U.S.-China relations. They also delved into what this means for President Xi Jinping’s ambitions for China, how he perceives the opportunities and challenges facing the country, how he interprets changes in U.S. policy, and how it may affect his calculus on China’s domestic and foreign affairs toward the United States in the coming months.

‘Survival Comes First’

Wang Xiao — Tuesday, March 18, 2025 - 1:47pm

Generation Z has now become the primary force among China’s growing ranks of China’s online content moderators, who number in the tens of thousands. Their physical stamina means they generally fare better with the intense demands of the job and can stay up late to respond quickly to issues with sensitive content. They now handle the bulk of the work for major internet platforms when it comes to content moderation. Also known as the “Internet Generation,” Generation Z also includes those born after 1995, who from birth have known only a world with the internet, which arrived in China in 1994. They are not just familiar with the internet, mobile technology, and smart applications, but have also grown up alongside the Great Firewall, which since 1996 has cut them off from the global internet.

Former Chinese Enemies Increasingly Aligned on Taiwan

Chris Horton — Tuesday, March 18, 2025 - 8:00am

A conservative party pledging to return the country to a glorious imagined past. Massive budget cuts across government ministries. Concerns about foreign influence. An unprecedented challenge of governmental checks and balances as a constitutional crisis looms.

Why Were 40 Uyghurs Extradited from Thailand to China?

Rune Steenberg — Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 12:19pm

On February 28, Thailand extradited 40 Uyghur men to China. The men were part of a larger group that fled to Thailand in 2014 to escape increasing repression in China. They had been in detention for over a decade as Bangkok tried to avoid angering either China, which demanded the Uyghurs’ repatriation, or other members of the international community, which urged Bangkok to allow the Uyghurs to resettle in a third country. Anthropologist and Uyghur interpreter Rune Steenberg considers the causes and implications of the sudden extradition.

U.S.-Soviet Détente and the Future of U.S.-China Relations

Christopher Chivvis — Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 12:11pm

In the early 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union passed through a period of intense rivalry. The Soviets built the Berlin Wall. A nuclear war almost broke out over Soviet plans to deploy missiles to Cuba. But surprisingly, within a few years relations started to thaw.

Xi Jinping’s Purges Have Escalated. Here’s Why They Are Unlikely to Stop

Wu Guoguang — Tuesday, February 25, 2025 - 12:26pm

The final months of 2024 witnessed a new wave of purges in Xi Jinping’s China. On November 28, the Defense Ministry announced the suspension from his duties of Admiral Miao Hua, the number four military leader below Xi, who oversaw the political and organizational work of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

In Taiwan, a Growing Cohort of ‘Preppers’ Readies Itself for an Uncertain Future

Grace Marion — Thursday, February 20, 2025 - 10:09am

Jenny Huang is practicing cleaning water from the creek near her apartment in Linkou, northwest of Taipei. She pours the water through pantyhouse to filter out sediment, then coffee filters for smaller particles, and finally adds iodine to kill bacteria and any microorganisms in the water. The 48-year-old mother of one believes someday it might be a necessity. She doesn’t bother learning how to gather rainwater, she says, because it is too polluted in the city, but for the most part the creek water runs down from the mountains.