Category Archives: Voices from China

New documentaries take on the horrors of China’s labor camp system

(May 7, 2013) Two new documentaries released this month reveal more horrifying details about China’s notorious re-education through labor (RTL) system. Other recent exposés of systemic human rights abuses in the RTL have led to calls to scrap the long-contested practice entirely. China’s new leadership is reportedly reviewing it. Continue reading

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Ningbo’s people power halts petrochemical plant expansion – for now

(November 2, 2012) The power of protest in China continues to gain momentum as yet another show of strength in numbers by protesters in Ningbo, an affluent port city of 3.4 million people, has halted a plan to expand petrochemical production in nearby Zhenhai. Continue reading

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No country for private houses

(October 26, 2012) The history of government property seizure in China reads like an appalling dystopian fiction. A new film, which debuted in New York on October 28, looks closely at the astonishing but all-too-true stories of individual citizens – survivors of this ongoing battle for property rights – who have been robbed of their homes, their lands, unconscionably beaten, tormented and forced to endure bizarre and cruel new realities as a result of a social-political ideology gone mad and corrupt officials and developers who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of power, privilege and gain. Continue reading

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Dammed and betrayed

(October 3, 2012) Wang Like is a Three Gorges Dam migrant who moved thinking it was his duty and honour to do so. Wang and his family, along with so many others, gave up everything for the construction of China’s concrete colossus – an edifice that would later be described as equal parts vanity project and technological marvel – in the belief that it was for a greater good. But on arrival in their new resettlement area, Wang’s family experienced what has become standard for countless Three Gorges Dam migrants: a welcome of open hostility, corruption of resettlement funds, broken promises and incomprehensible ill-treatment – as though he and his fellow migrants were being punished for their sacrifice. Wang’s story is rendered in powerful detail here, in a letter he wrote to a sympathetic journalist, in the hopes his voice would be heard. Continue reading

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Air pollution harder to deny in cyber China

(February 1, 2012) China’s cyber citizens, or ‘netizens’ as they are known, are forcing their government to come clean-er on air pollution. Continue reading

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Weibo Watch: Issue 10

(January 23, 2012) In this instalment of Weibo Watch: grassroots social activism takes off. Continue reading

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Weibo Watch: Issue 9

(November 21, 2011) In this instalment of Weibo Watch: the media investigates cadmium-contaminated rice, technological bird kills, and rivers polluted with heavy metals or choked with weeds; netizens catch online vendors selling protected species; and professors kneel in protest against steel factories, setting off a heated debate. Continue reading

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Who’s on notice: Ai Weiwei or the Chinese government?

(November 16, 2011) The notice from tax authorities has launched Ai as a cause célèbre yet again but, this time, and significantly, within China. Continue reading

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