What We Talk About When We Talk About “The Uyghurs”
How did Western media accounts transform China’s Xinjiang region from an obscure, exotic district into a hotbed of terrorism?
Fall 2024
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Populism and Other Epithets
In their efforts to smear Spain’s Podemos party as “populist,” pundits have only revealed the vacuousness of the term.
Occupy Central: The Migrant Workers in Democracy’s Blind Spot
Hong Kongers have never been quite comfortable discussing the 300,000 migrant domestic workers, most of whom are female, to which the city currently plays host. Complicating the discussion further is the media’s tendency to steer such discussions from issues of fair wages and workplace safety toward the still more vexing question of citizenship.
May Fourth Movements
Ninety-five years ago today, Beijing students gathered in front of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and launched a mass movement against corruption and foreign bullying. Seventy years later, in 1989, student protesters would gather at the same spot to claim the May Fourth mantle—only to be brutally repressed.
Taiwan’s Sunflower Protests: A Q&A with Shelley Rigger
Yesterday, students ended a three-week occupation of Taiwan’s legislature. To help explain the causes and meaning of the protests, and place them in historical perspective, Jeffrey Wasserstrom speaks with Shelley Rigger, a political scientist, Taiwan expert, and author of Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse.
Trials and Errors: A Roundtable on Law, Reform, and Repression in China
Early in 2013, as Xi Jinping prepared to take over leadership of China, some high-profile Western analysts were cautiously optimistic about where the country was heading. But far from bringing a longed-for “easing” of controls on expression and civil society activities, the Year of the Snake often saw the ratcheting up of mechanisms of control and intimidation. As we move into the Year of the Horse, Jeffrey Wasserstrom brings together four legal experts to discuss.
The End of China’s One-Child Policy? An Interview with Mei Fong
What exactly did the recent Third Plenum reveal about Xi Jinping’s strategy for dealing with the big issues facing China in the nine years left in his time heading the Chinese Communist Party? Initially, the consensus seemed to be that …
Chinese Censorship: More Complicated Than You Think
One Chinese subject that even those Dissent readers with no special interest in China know a good deal about is Beijing’s obsession with controlling information. Given the news coverage of the topic they’ve encountered over the years, few were likely to have been …
Looking Back at the June 4 Massacre, Twenty-Four Years on
Many supporters of the Tiananmen movement hoped that the regime would reassess the protests of 1989. A similar set of 1976 demonstrations were initially dubbed “counterrevolutionary riots” but then reassessed as a “patriotic” struggle. But the situation relating to the June 4 Massacre is very different.
The Pollution Crisis and Environmental Activism in China: A Q&A with Ralph Litzinger
The last year has seen a dramatic uptick in press coverage of Chinese environmental issues. There have also been a number of books published on the subject, with more due out soon. So this seemed a good moment to get in touch with Ralph Litzinger, an anthropologist based at Duke University.
China’s Youth: Do They Dare to Care about Politics?
Young people in China are divorced from their country’s recent history. With no memory of Mao Zedong, they can glean little from a censored environment. Their parents, by and large, don’t talk about their experiences
Chinese Workers Foxconned
Delivering flexibility and scale at rock-bottom prices, Foxconn keeps pounding out the very real underpinnings of the New Economy, remaking global manufacturing in its own image. Foxconn stands as the archetypal industrial firm for today’s planet of slums.
Women’s Rights at Risk
A combination of factors in recent years has contributed to a fall in the status and material well-being of Chinese women relative to men.
Land of Many Nationalisms
Increasingly, residents of the Chinese mainland, especially the middle-class urbanites who regularly go online, seek answers to questions like: Is it possible to be a Chinese patriot, while acknowledging one’s unhappiness with the status quo?
Fast Change and Its Discontents
Jeffrey Wasserstrom introduces a special section on China in the Spring 2013 issue: “Wherever this protean country moves next, it will be taken there not just by people whose names are widely known but by those whose dreams, desires, aspirations, and actions make up China’s 99 percent.”
