Baby bust: what happens when China's population shrinks?
China’s population is ageing. It’s estimated that a quarter of Chinese people will be elderly within three decades. The relaxing of its one child policy – first to two children in 2016 and then to thr...
21 Feb 202245min
The Xi-Putin alliance: how China and Russia are getting ever closer
In 2008, President George Bush was the star guest at Beijing’s opening ceremony. Fourteen years later, under a cloud of diplomatic boycotts led by the US, the guest of honour spot was filled instead b...
7 Feb 202241min
Politics and language: decoding the CCP
All political parties have weaknesses for jargon and buzzwords, and the Chinese Communist Party more than most. It's why Party documents – whether they be speeches, Resolutions or reports – can be har...
24 Jan 202259min
Why does China care about the Olympics?
'If table tennis set the stage for China’s international diplomacy, then volleyball rebuilt the nation’s confidence', ran one article in the People's Daily around the time of the 2016 Rio Olympics. Sp...
10 Jan 202241min
The power of Weibo
When the tennis star Peng Shuai had a row with her former lover, the retired Party cadre Zhang Gaoli, she took to Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, where she had half a million followers. It w...
13 Dec 202139min
What is it to be 'Chinese'?
Sun Yat-sen was the founding father of China's first republic, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown. Here he sits, with his successor Chiang Kai-Shek standing behind. They were two among many intellec...
29 Nov 202141min
Is 'common prosperity' the road to common poverty?
Deng Xiaoping used to say, 'let some people get rich first'. Four decades on from the start of his economic experiment with marketisation, Xi Jinping is, these days, talking about 'common prosperity' ...
15 Nov 202131min
Healing the 'cancer' of the Cultural Revolution
It's not easy to talk about the Cultural Revolution inside China - let alone teach it. In recent years, one of the last professors to have taught the period has been hounded out of her role at a top u...
1 Nov 202137min
