North Korea's Stepped-Up Rhetoric: Is It More Than Talk?
North Korea has cut its last military hotlines with South Korea and yet again stepped up its rhetoric, rattling nerves in the region. Thousands of North Koreans rallied in central Pyongyang, chanting...
View ArticleFor Chinese Women, Marriage Depends On Right 'Bride Price'
Women hold up half the sky, China's Chairman Mao famously said. But in China, the one-child policy and the traditional preference for boys mean that 117 boys are born for every 100 baby girls. By one...
View ArticleChasing The Chinese Dream — If You Can Define It
Forget about the American dream. Nowadays, the next big thing is the Chinese dream. In Beijing, it's the latest official slogan, mentioned on the front page of the official People's Daily 24 times in a...
View ArticleChinese Dreams: Freedom, Democracy And Clean Air
"What is your Chinese dream?" With Chinese leaders and the state-run media now talking about the notion of the Chinese dream, we posed this question on our NPR Weibo account . In China, Weibo is the...
View ArticleTo Silence Discontent, Chinese Officials Alter Workweek
How do you prevent protests in China? Move the weekend. That's the Orwellian step taken by local authorities in the southwestern city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. May 4 is a sensitive...
View ArticleFive Years After A Quake, Chinese Cite Shoddy Reconstruction
Five years after the massive Wenchuan quake in China's Sichuan province left about 90,000 dead and missing, allegations are surfacing that corruption and official wrongdoing have plagued the...
View ArticleChildren Of China's Wealthy Learn Expensive Lessons
In China, having too much money is a relatively new problem. But the rapidly growing country is second only to the U.S. in its number of billionaires, according to Forbes magazine. And now an...
View ArticleChina's Artist Provocateur Explores New Medium: Heavy Metal
The man ArtReview magazine named the most powerful artist in the world is trying his hand at rock stardom. In 2011, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei spent 81 days in detention. He was later let go and...
View ArticleTargets Of Disgraced Bo Xilai Still Languish In Jail
It was 5 p.m. on an ordinary Tuesday, and Li Ping was finishing up the company accounts before going to have a facial. She was working for her brother, Li Qiang, who owned one of the biggest private...
View ArticleFor China's Youth, A Life Of 'Darkness Outside The Night'
Xie Peng, a 36-year-old Chinese graphic novelist, spent six years working on his first book, Darkness Outside the Nigh t . It's been praised by China's first Nobel laureate for literature, Mo Yan , as...
View ArticleCalls For Justice For Tiananmen Met With Silence
Ding Zilin has spent the past 24 years on one mission: seeking justice for the death of her son, 17-year-old Jiang Jielian, who was shot in the back by Chinese soldiers on the night of June 3, 1989....
View ArticleBelly Dancing For The Dead: A Day With China's Top Mourner
File under "one of the oddest jobs ever": professional mourner. China's funeral rituals date back 2,000 years to the Han dynasty, but were banned during the Cultural Revolution as superstition. Now...
View ArticleAfter 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen
Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators...
View Article25 Years On, Mothers Of Tiananmen Square Dead Seek Answers
The elderly woman carefully handed over the tissue-thin white paper slip. The flimsy invoice was her son's death notice. The words hurriedly scrawled on it in blue ink — "shot outside and died" — were...
View ArticleFor Many Of China's Youth, June 4 May As Well Be Just Another Day
They peered at the photo blankly, leaning to take in the details. "Is it from South Korea?" asked a student studying for a doctorate in marketing, with no flicker of recognition. "Is it Kosovo?" a...
View ArticleFor One Soldier At Tiananmen, A Day 'Never Forgotten'
Hour after hour passed as Chen Guang stood, gun trembling in his hands, behind the doors of Beijing's Great Hall of the people, waiting for the order to clear Tiananmen Square of its student...
View ArticleJune 4: The Day That Defines, And Still Haunts China
As China prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its brutal repression of protests around Tiananmen Square, its leaders have presided over an unprecedented pre-anniversary crackdown. Rights groups say...
View ArticleIn Australia, Decades Of Abuse Against Military Recruits Comes To Light
Editor's Note: There are descriptions of rape and other forms of sexual abuse in this story. All that remains is a pair of yellow gates, perched on the crest of a hill dotted with gum trees and...
View ArticleInventor Who Made Chinese Easier To Read, Dies
Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: The inventor of Pinyin - that's the system of transcribing Chinese characters in the Roman alphabet - has died. Zhou Youguang had just...
View ArticleAustralia's Prime Minister Is Ousted By His Own Party
Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit NOEL KING, HOST: All right, some interesting news out of Australia this morning. For the sixth time in 10 years, Australia has a new prime minister. This comes...
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