The Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989 was a defining moment in Chinese history, widely interpreted as a sign of China’s impending doom. It has proven to be anything but. China is the world’s most rapidly changing society. The Communists are still in power – but with capitalists in its ranks. Chinese farmers oppose the harsh policies of corrupt local government – but use cell phones to report state violence to foreign journalists. Since Tiananmen, China’s annual GDP has averaged 9% and it’s in everyone’s interests to keep the nation’s economic expansion going, writes Donald H. Straszheim , a longtime China watcher and expert on the Chinese economy.
Tibetan Blunder
Tibetans and their supporters worldwide have taken to the streets in record numbers lately to protest human rights abuses in China and the 58-year-old Chinese occupation of Tibet. Over the years, a lot of things have stood between Beijing’s dictatorial rule and Tibet’s freedom — but you’d never guess the most formidable barrier: The Dalai Lama himself.
Bound-Foot in China
In a remote village in southwestern China live 300 women whose feet were crushed long ago to the size of a child’s. They are the last survivors haunted by a mutilating tradition that lasted a millennium – solely for men’s pleasure.
China Syndrome
Tibet has been a thorn in China’s side ever since Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army invaded the Roof of the World in 1950. The recent unrest in Lhasa resulted in a Chinese crackdown that has effectively transformed the Beijing Olympics into what some are calling the “Human Rights Games.” In a wide-ranging interview with AsiaScoop Editor Ajay Singh, veteran Sinologist Richard Baum, a professor of political science at UCLA, dissects China’s Tibet challenge and other major problems that plague the nation. Baum’s latest book, China Watcher: Confessions of a Peking Tom, will be published in early 2009.
Shanghai Malls
Forget Beijing and the 2008 Olympics. As Shanghai goes, so goes the rest of China. After she graduated from Stanford University this past spring, Katie Salisbury spent nine weeks in China’s most industrial and cosmopolitan city, studying its shopping malls and the people who inhabit them. For Salisbury, it was a fascinating, if somewhat pricey, experience.
