In March 2019, workplace safety issues came under the spotlight again in China. On 21 March, a deadly explosion occured at the Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical Company, in Yancheng city, Jiangsu province, killing at least 64 people and injuring ten times as many. The explosion, as powerful as a 2.2 magnitude tremor, flattened the factory, destroyed […]
[Read the English version here] Qualche settimana fa, il nuovo Sottosegretario allo Sviluppo Economico Michele Geraci ha pubblicato sul blog di Beppe Grillo ‘La Cina e il governo del cambiamento’, un articolo in cui espone la sua visione di una ‘più attenta politica estera ed economica rivolta alla Cina’ per ‘[aumentare] le probabilità di […]
With Xi Jinping going on an official visit to Italy this Thursday and the Italian government considering the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), we felt that it was a fitting time to republish this open letter signed by 23 Italian scholars in the field of […]
The year 2019 has not brought any positive changes to the state of affairs in Xinjiang. Official state policy has repeatedly asserted that Muslim ‘reeducation camps’ assume a crucial role in China’s fight against terrorism and separatism in Xinjiang, as the Chinese authorities claim to have arrested over 13,000 ‘terrorists’. However, there is now mounting […]
In the first quarter of 2019, many of the Maoist students and activists at the centre of the Jasic struggle—including Yue Xin, Shen Mengyu, Gu Jiayue, Zheng Yongming, and He Pengchao—appeared in forced confession videos screened privately to student activists at Peking University. According to students who secretly recorded the audio, in the taped confessions […]
The first quarter of 2019 has seen important steps taken to strengthen protection of women’s rights.In December 2018, the ACWF lobbied the SPC to take into account the interests of women in judicial interpretation, develop a gender equality assessment mechanism, promote the legalisation of women’s rights protection in cooperation with the ACWF itself, and protect […]
The first quarter of 2019 has seen the continued repression of human rights advocates, lawyers, and civil society groups. On 14 January, blogger Huang Qi was tried for leaking state secrets. In a sad turn of events, his mother was detained after approaching foreign embassies in Beijing for assistance in obtaining the release of her […]
In December 2018, the Chinese authorities commemorated the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up. These four decades of unprecedented economic growth and transformation have been rooted in a fundamental socioeconomic restructuring. Contemporary China has changed from a largely agrarian society predominantly inhabited by peasants, to a rapidly urbanising one, characterised by a floating populace moving back and forth between rural and urban spaces, which are in a continuous state of flux. Going hand in hand with China’s ascent into modernity is the subordination of rural areas and people. While rural China has historically been a site of extraction and exploitation, in the post-reform period this has intensified, and rurality itself has become a problem. This issue of Made in China focuses on the labour that these attempts to restructure and reformulate rural China have entailed, and the ways in which they have transformed rural lives and communities.
In the last quarter of 2018, China’s human rights record continued to deteriorate. October began with the disappearance of a high-level official—Meng Hongwei, then President of Interpol and Deputy Minister of Public Security in China, who was reported missing after travelling from France to China on 5 October. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has […]
In early November 2018, more than a dozen students and recent college graduates who had expressed their support for the Jasic mobilisation were detained. Staff of a social work organisation in Shenzhen and two employees of a district-level ACFTU branch in the same city were also caught up in the crackdown. Those who were detained […]
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