Photo: Keizo- O-kubo/Nippon Foundation For Social Innovation.
In isolated pockets around the world, it still exists: the dread disease leprosy. China’s Global Times explores the mountain leper colonies of the country’s south, finding that even healthy descendents of lepers are treated as outcastes and untouchables by the people of surrounding villages.
The only way to get to the village of Abuluoha is on foot - a four-hour trek via a single.
Zhonguo. 'China' in Mandarin. By Steve Webel. Photo CC.
The expatriate American and British ‘academics’ who make a living telling China what it wants to hear about itself. Not specialists on China, or speakers of Chinese, or indeed scholars at all, they easily find cushy university posts from which they write blogs and columns about the superiority of the Chinese system.
"China has the best human rights record in the world," says one.
Jianxiang city. Photo CC: Ang Li
China’s Wenzhou, long the most entrepreneurial and capitalist of the country’s large cities, and home to its largest population of Christians, who like to display the success of their faith. Too much display for the province’s rulers however: Beijing’s Global Times writes that numerous churches are abruptly being ordered demolished around the region.
Wenzhou, in China's eastern Zhejiang Province,meaning "to demolish."
Beijing, China. Photo CC: Colin.
China’s infamous compulsory birth control policies were eased last year, but Global Times reporters are skeptical that this will yield many new babies: China appears to have undergone a permanent demographic transition.
When the country announced that it was further easing the family planning policy, allowing millions more women to have a second child.
Liberty Leading the People. Yue Minjun.
For one French expatriate living in China, the unpleasant reality sets in: he is not a particularly skilled worker, he is not living like a king among the natives, and China doesn’t really want him around anymore. The end of the Chinese Dream, for Westerners who thought they could live off the country’s boom, based on nothing but their native language.
I have lived in China for more than a year now.
Inside, the air is clean. Shopping mall in Beijing. Photo CC: Kwong Yee Cheng.
On bad weeks, they take shelter in giant shopping malls warmed by artificial suns, the air scrubbed clean of its deadly burden. Outside, eight-year olds die of lung cancer, and parents try to create clean rooms to protect their children. Beijing’s coal-fired pollution catastrophe.
No matter what she did to try and protect her 3-year-old son from Beijing's notoriously serious pollution,.
Portrait of a young woman. Region of Mawlamyaingyune. Myanmar. Photo: ILO / M. Crozet.
In southern China, writes Liang Chen, men who cannot find a local wife often illegally marry women smuggled in from Burma or other Southeast Asian countries. A peculiar simulacrum of normal family life ensues; the women eventually learn to speak Chinese and assimilate to Fujian culture, but there is no possible road to citizenship, and their children are not acknowledged by the state.
Chen Dewu (not his real name), a villager in Zhangwan town, in Fujian Province, never imagined he would marry a Myanmar woman.
Hong Kong, an ideal place for those who want to circumvent the one-child policy.
In the United States, politicians occasionally raise the specter of hordes of pregnant Latin Americans crossing the border to gain birthright citizenship for their children. Hong Kong (which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world) is a short car ride from mainland China, but worlds apart in terms of quality of life and educational possibilities; many mainland women try to time a visit to the autonomous city-state for a fortuitous birth. Mainland China’s daily Caijing discusses the territory’s supposed ‘anchor baby’ problem.
In recent years, Hong Kong has seen an influx of expectant mothers from the Chinese mainland who travel to the city to give birth.
