China Currents 2015 Issue Volume 14 Number 1
The overarching themes that emerge from the offerings in this edition of China Currents will be familiar to anyone who follows China closely. Our authors all deal with the complex relationship between the pull of the market, the push for…
“Unrealistic Expectations” On September 29, 2013, China officially opened the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, or FTZ, an outwardly ambitious project to bring a new wave of foreign investment and reduction in restrictions that have plagued foreign businesses in China for…
The allegation of child labor did not exactly fit the picture I was looking at — a photo of a toddler sitting next to a box with my client’s logo on it. Accompanying the photo, a whistleblowing email from the…
Introduction Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce firm, raised $25 billion from its initial U.S. public offering (IPO) in September 2014 putting China on the e-commerce world map. This exemplified China’s ongoing transformation from a low-skilled, cheap labor manufacturing assembly economy to…
A 2011 biography of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah or king of Iran from 1941 to 1979, lays out a number of haunting similarities between Iran’s experience under the shah and the Chinese Communist Party’s rule of China today. Authored…
The new documentary film “The Land of Many Palaces” examines planned urbanization in China from the vantage point of Ordos in Inner Mongolia. Ordos is a vast, newly built city populated by people who have moved by the thousands from surrounding farms. China…