The Chinese Communist Party’s clumsy handling of censorship and freedom of expression will negatively impact both its strategic relationships abroad and its ability to juggle domestic political issues.

For the generation of youths who grew up under the One-Child Policy, life harbors promise, and most hope that their futures will follow an upward trajectory. As the SACOM report analyzes, the younger workers are vulnerable to an identity crisis, in which they neither belong entirely in the city nor conceptualize themselves as part of the countryside.

“A Madman’s Diary” is Lu Xun’s deafening plea for the younger generation of Chinese citizens to abandon the ways endorsed by traditional Chinese philosophy and belief systems.

The geopolitical determinist would argue that the stage for the 1962 border dispute was set from the start; because the north-east and north-west extremities of India’s Himalayan border with China lacked buffer states, the two would eventually come into conflict. However, this oversimplifies the events that led to war. Domestic politics and national pride played a key role in China’s decision to go to war in 1962. The border conflict was far from inevitable.

The strong correlation between imports and exports of sophisticated products demonstrates that China imports unfinished sophisticated parts from other East Asian countries, and then it simply assembles the parts without adding much value in this portion of the production chain.

K’ang hsi is considered one of the greatest emperors in Chinese history because he paved the road for the Qing Dynasty’s most stable and prosperous time for the next 100 years. In The Sacred Edict, K’ang hsi does a good job of portraying his ideal hierarchical and collective society, which reflects Confucian values. The Sacred Edict hints us clues how the informal institution in China has been implemented.

This article is an excerpt from The China Brief, reprinted here with the permission of the Forum for Chinese American Exchange at Stanford (FACES). FACES is an international organization dedicated to promoting constructive, bilateral US-China relations in the global community by fostering personal relationships and mutual understanding among future leaders in the US and China. Please find the original article at: http://faces.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/

[Her] parents have worked in Beijing for many years. She is eager to live with her parents. But they lead a laborious life and they have to take care of her younger brother at the same time. Her parents had to leave her with her grandmother. Her father took her to Beijing once, but she could not be enrolled by Beijing schools because the tuition fee was as high as several thousands Yuan, which is an astronomical figure to their family. She had to be sent back… (China Agricultural University, 2005, p.23)

Though the emerging superpower contender was relatively late to embrace the Internet phenomenon, a tremendous amount of web development has occurred in recent years. Despite the potential benefit of the Internet to its billion-plus denizens, the Chinese Communist Party has created one of the world’s foremost web sentry systems – the Golden Shield Project.

As the city gains diversity but loses its own national identity, its individuals lose their own sense of identity. As the market economy influences the city to adopt the impersonal exchange model, the individuals become increasingly alienated from their fellow citizens.