China’s government tries to raise the number of newborns to offset an aging population, but the latest demographics show Chinese do not follow that lead as the country’s birthrate is dropping. People choose to make a different choice, explains social commentator Zhang Lijia in the Guardian. “And society has become more tolerant.”Read More →

Panic struck some commentators in China when recent official figures showed the country counted 240 single households, the largest number for any country in the world. While China and the Chinese still might have to get used to this feature, those numbers are not surprising, says author Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post.Read More →

Shanghai-based VC William Bao Bean explains that entering a new market means leaving behind the experience to collected in the past, leave behind your cultural baggage, and learn from your mistakes. William Bao Bean is a General Partner at SOSV – The Accelerator VC – the #2 most active angel and seed-stage investors in the world 2019 with US$700m under management.Read More →

Not authoritarian rule but solid support from China’s citizens allowed its government to beat the Covid-19 and effectively deal with the coronavirus crisis, argues Singapore-based journalist Ian Johnson, in the New York Review of Books. He uses the Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City by Fang Fang, to show the government did not silence critics but did win majority support by its people, helped by indeed heavily manipulated media in China.Read More →

As the Black Lives Matter movement took over some of the headlines, China typically dismissed racism as a Western problem. Author Zhang Lijia begs to differ, in The Wire. “The Chinese government claims to have “zero tolerance” for racism, but there have been no reports that anyone has been punishedRead More →

This month the provisory agreement for cooperating on the nomination of bishops between the Vatican and the Chinese government is up for renewable. Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, explains why the deal was for the Roman-Catholic church an “understandable gamble,” according to the NCR.Read More →

Nationalistic sentiments at the recent National People’s Congress (NPC) triggered off proposals to abolish English translations on all government-related events in China. London-based author Zhang Lijia explains why that is the wrong move, and why learning English is still important, also for Chinese, at the South China Morning Post.Read More →

COVID-19 or the Coronavirus has triggered off a lot of soul-searching in China, says social commentator Zhang Lijia in the South China Morning Post. “All these problems at home and abroad are proof that nature has been interfered with, as humans go against the natural order. This is a good time to revisit the philosophical aspects of Taoism, writes Zhang Lijia.Read More →

Not only high costs are stopping Chinese women from getting more children, as the government wants them to for offsetting the dramatic aging process of the country, writes journalist Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus, a novel, on prostitution in China,  in the South China Morning Post. “The reality is far more complex. One important reason, in my view, is that women have changed. They don’t care to be only the reproductive tool of the family or the state,” she writes.Read More →