Unlike their counterparts in the rest of the world, China’s youngsters are fiercely saving their money, says business analyst Shaun Rein at CNBC. “Unlike youths in the 2010s who often spent more than they earned and borrowed money to buy fancy items like Gucci handbags and Apple iPhone, young Chinese have started saving more,” he told CNBC. Read More →
Officially China does not allow single women to freeze their eggs and forces them to go abroad or even register children of single mothers to register. But demographic pressure is already changing those restrictions on a provincial level, says author Zhang Lijia in the Guardian who expects more changes to come.Read More →
China veteran Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (September 2023), and fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin describes how a generation of underground historians passed on their stories while staying under the radar.Read More →
China veteran Ian Johnson, author of China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future (September 2023), announces he will leave as senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and move from New York to Berlin. He will work as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and work from Berlin starting on July 1, 2024, writing a new book on the misuses of religion in Xi’s China in the summer of 2024.Read More →
Foreign media too often focus on China’s crackdown on religion, but former foreign correspondent Ian Johnson, author of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, sees an opposite trend as China’s government started to support traditional faiths, in an effort to gain new legitimacy, he writes in the Council on Foreign Relations. Read More →
Hong Kong-based marketing guru Ashley Dudarenok discusses the way China’s market is different from the rest of the world in terms of platform, consumer behavior, and other elements of the crowded and fast-moving market. A debate on Vistatalks with Maria Coa.Read More →
Journalist and author Ian Johnson discusses his latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, on why and how he came to write his book. Questions are asked by Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York and Glenn Tiffert a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China.Read More →
Multinationals do not have to look at Vietnam and India as a replacement for China, says business analyst Shaun Rein at CNBC. In the next ten years China’s middle class is going to grow massively, and cannot be beaten by anybody else, he adds. “About 400 million poorer Chinese are getting into the middle class in the years to come,” he says.Read More →
A large number of the illegal immigrants entering the US from Mexico are Chinese, and not only poor Chinese, says China scholar Ian Johnson in DW. They mostly rely on dubious information on TikTok and have no clue what kind of adventure they get into, he adds.Read More →
Inequality has been one of China’s central problems, writes author and journalist Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. There is no shortage of efforts to fix it, she argues, and while China has dealt with poverty successfully, getting to common prosperity, as it is called, seems much harder to achieve.Read More →
Financial expert Victor Shih looks at the dilemma China faces as local debts run out of hand, while revenue is dropping, and consumer confidence is low, at a panel discussion at the Ray School of Management at the UC San Diego.Read More →
Book reviews of Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future by China veteran and Pulitzer prize winner Ian Johnson start to come in, rightfully, like this overview in Public Discourse by Robert Carle. “In Sparks, Ian Johnson tells the stories of people such as Lin Zhao and Hu Jie—Chinese journalists and filmmakers who explore the darkest episodes of Chinese communism, often at great risk to themselves.”Read More →