Category: The Economist

HENRY WANG enjoyed his recent trip to the province of Sichuan. The 22-year-old was in China to attend a camp for young Taiwanese. He spent seven nights in four-star hotels, feasting on hot pot, viewing pandas and visiting historic sites. The Chinese government paid for most of it. The only annoying part was the political indoctrination. He tolerated yammering about cross-strait unity, praise for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and songs about being one family. “I thought of it as the extra cost I had to pay for a cheap trip,”…

In the desert outside Kashgar, an oasis city in the far-western region of Xinjiang, an ancient Buddhist stupa rises out of the sand. Because of its conical shape, it is known as Mo’er, the word for “chimney” in the language of the native Uyghurs. The stupa and a temple next to it were probably built some 1,700 years ago and abandoned a few centuries later. Chinese archaeologists started excavating the site in 2019. They have dug up stone tools, copper coins and fragments of a Buddha statue. The Economist

A SWIFT end to the Ukraine war on Russian terms would fill many governments with a sense of loss. In much of western Europe and beyond, a deal that rewarded Russia for its aggression—exchanging a ceasefire for vast swathes of Ukrainian territory, for instance, or a pledge that Ukraine will never join NATO or any other Western alliance—would feel like appeasement, not peacemaking. A pillar of the post-second-world-war order, involving a refusal to see borders redrawn by force, would have fallen. The Economist

It was an isolated incident, the government insists. On June 24th a Chinese man attacked a Japanese woman and her child at a bus stop outside a Japanese school in the city of Suzhou. A Chinese school-bus attendant, Hu Youping, tried to shield the pair, only to be stabbed herself. She died days later. The local administration has called Ms Hu a “righteous and courageous” role model. The Economist

FOR SENIOR Chinese officials charged with wrongdoing, the road to justice is often long and winding. The first step is usually detention, interrogation and an internal investigation conducted quietly by the disciplinary arm of the Communist Party. This triggers frantic but uninformed chatter about the official’s disappearance. Weeks or months later, state-controlled media confirm that he or she has been removed from their post and is under investigation. Some time after that it is announced that the official has been stripped of party membership. The matter then gets turned over…

IN QUESHAN COUNTY, on the plains of central China, fields that are usually green with maize plants are brown and dusty. It has barely rained for two months and village wells are running dry. “We depend on the Emperor of Heaven to make a living,” says Yang Ning, a grizzled 67-year-old farmer, referring to a deity who controls the weather. “I don’t dare to hope.” The drought, which has affected eight Chinese provinces, is the worst many locals can remember. The Economist

For nearly a decade Roxie was one of Shanghai’s (and China’s) few lesbian bars. It hosted speed dating and pole dancing, and boasted an unusually risqué decor (patrons were encouraged to hang their bras above the counter). But earlier this month the bar announced that it would close. It blamed “forces beyond our control”, a euphemism for official pressure. On June 16th, Roxie’s last night, grieving revellers danced and drank while holding a large rainbow flag over their heads. The Economist

When Cheng Yingsheng, the director of one of China’s top university hospitals, was placed under investigation for alleged corruption in June, it marked a difficult spell for doctors in China. The authorities have recently rattled them with a string of high-profile arrests of leading medical figures. But that is not the doctors’ only worry. The government is also pushing through a health-care reform that is upsetting many of them. The Economist

China’s lunar probe, called Chang’e-6 (pictured), landed in Inner Mongolia on June 25th after a nearly two-month-long mission to the Moon’s far side. Scientists hope that the samples it collected will provide new insights into lunar geology and the formation of planets. China is the only country to have explored the side of the Moon that is always facing away from Earth. The successful mission is a boost for China’s space programme, to which it has devoted vast resources. It hopes to send astronauts to the Moon by 2030. And…

In politics, fringe ideas can become mainstream and vice versa. The “window of political possibility” can expand or move, as Joe Overton, an American political analyst, once put it. The same is true even in communist China. In 1978, for example, the country’s Overton window made a momentous shift. Two years after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, it became possible for the party to acknowledge that the great helmsman was not infallible. This pragmatism paved the way for faster economic reform and for Deng Xiaoping to become China’s paramount…