In Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich, John Osburg, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester, takes his readers into a shady underworld, where entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats mingle and forge the networks underpinning China’s socialist market economy. Osburg’s informants include a cast of memorable characters, many of whom could just [...]
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments,” advised the Bard. While no one doubts that their minds are true and the potential synergy is great, in the heady, $586 million marriage of Alibaba, the owner of China’s dominant e-commerce site Taobao, and Sina Weibo, China’s favorite microblogging platform, what might [...]
In April, China’s central government and provincial authorities released data on the country’s economic performance for the first quarter of 2013. On April 15, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that the country’s year-on-year real GDP growth rate had been 7.7 percent. But something baffling arises when one compares the number published by the central [...]
Guerrilla warfare, Mao Zedong’s favorite modus operandi, is being used against the army he created. And the grassroots warriors have just scored a small victory. China’s Internet users began a campaign earlier this year to post photos of luxury cars carrying special military plates on China’s social media, mainly the sites Sina Weibo and Tianya. Vehicles with easily recognizable [...]
A resounding victory has been scored against China’s all-powerful state-owned telecom operators — a victory for innovative, life-changing technology, for private enterprises and entrepreneurs, and for millions of users who came together on China’s social media to make their voices heard. On April 23, about a month after the head of China’s Ministry of Industry [...]
In the past weeks, Chinese citizens have learnt that the styrofoam boxes from which they eat their lunches will soon be legal. On February 16, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s highest economic policy-making body, changed the Industrial Restructuring Catalog (2011) and removed disposable foam plastic tableware from the list of banned products. [...]
Until recently, Chen Tao (@陈涛哥在成都) worked at Alibaba, a Chinese Internet company, as an in-house censor deleting inappropriate postings. Now, he drives six hours every weekend from his home in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, up into the mountains to the north of the city to purchase wild mushrooms, free range eggs and organic honey. Chen [...]
China’s new president Xi Jinping has made the achievement of the “Chinese Dream” the goal of his tenure, but for many among China’s elite, their dream may be emigrating to another country. According to a report by Center for China & Globalization on China’s immigration trends published in 2012, an immigration wave is sweeping up [...]
Modern Chinese literature is flourishing—at least for those who have an Internet connection. A survey by Chinese Internet market research firm iResearch counted a total of 12.2 million daily readers among China’s top ten literary websites. These websites together contain millions of online books, some reaching millions of Chinese characters in length. Qidian.com is the [...]
In recent years, issues about China’s pension system have repeatedly hit a public nerve. Among the hot topics consistently reappearing on the front pages of Chinese papers, the social pension perhaps has the most direct influence on people’s lives. Yet convoluted procedures and a lack of transparency make the institution hard to decipher. From time [...]
The battle lines are drawn in what is shaping up to be an epic duel between China’s all-powerful state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and its millions of Internet users. As Tea Leaf Nation previously reported, the Chinese government is contemplating plans to impose fees on Weixin, also known as WeChat, a mobile messaging app with almost 400 [...]
On March 25, China’s Ministry of Finance publicly released the central government’s budget for the 2013 fiscal year, which was approved by the National People’s Congress (NPC) during the closing ceremony of the annual Two Sessions meeting. Though one of the most significant legislative motions the NPC processes each year, information about the budget has [...]
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