In July, the rural village of Qiuxian in Beijing’s Daxing district announced plans to start charging migrant residents 2,000 yuan (about 295 USD) per month. The document released by the village leadership stated that the fees collected would be used to pay for public sanitation, tap water, public security, and electricity, but also made it […]
In July, Shenyang Urban Construction University offered a public apology to a second year student pressured by the university into a three-month internship at a Foxconn factory in Yantai, Shandong province. The university had told her that, had she refused to comply, she would not have been able to graduate. To deal with rising labour […]
On 13 July, the activist and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo passed away at the age of sixty-one in the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang. Much to the anger of his friends and supporters, his ashes were buried at sea, off the coast of Dalian. Liu had been imprisoned since 2009 for ‘inciting […]
Claiming sixty-nine thousand victims, the earthquake that hit Sichuan province on 12 May 2008 not only took an enormous toll in human lives, but also had a major political impact in China. In his book Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, Christian Sorace examines the political mechanisms at work in the aftermath of the tragedy. We spoke with the author.
In late May, Hua Haifeng, Su Heng, and Li Zhao—three labour activists working for the New York-based advocacy group China Labor Watch (CLW)—were detained by the police in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, while investigating labour conditions at factories making designer shoes for global brands. In particular, they were inspecting a supplier of Ivanka Trump’s fashion brand. […]
At the end of April, the ordeal of Li Heping, a prominent lawyer who was caught up in the ‘709 crackdown’ against the weiquan community that took place in July 2015, came to an end. After being detained for almost two years, Li, who is well known to the international community for his overt rights […]
In late April, Fan Yusu, a forty-four-year-old female migrant worker from Hubei province, was propelled to literary stardom when her essay entitled ‘I am Fan Yusu’ went viral. Fan’s writing recounted a life marked by patriarchy, domestic abuse, and raising children singlehandedly. She detailed her feelings of isolation, and the challenges she faced living as […]
At the end of April, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released its latest annual report on Chinese migrant workers. According to the NBS, in 2016 there were 281,710,000 migrants in China—1.5 percent more than the previous year. Chinese workers appeared to be increasingly reluctant to migrate far away from their hometowns. In 2016, 112,370,000 […]
On 17 April, Premier Li Keqiang told a meeting of top state-owned enterprise (SOE) executives at the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission in Beijing that the government was reconsidering a 2015 policy capping their pay, and promised more competitive rates tied to performance. According to a Xinhua report, executives’ pay and other rewards or […]
On 10 April, the Beijing State Security Bureau released a set of Measures on Rewards for Citizens Reporting Leads on Espionage Conduct. These regulations promised informants who reported on spies rewards ranging between 10,000 and 500,000 yuan, depending on the relevance and usefulness of the information provided. The new regulations were accompanied by the online […]
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