Liu Ping (photo: Gilles Sabrie for The International Herald Tribune)

A recent article in The New York Times highlights a grassroots movement among China’s women to seek government positions and generally assert a greater dialogue for women’s issues in China. Focusing on activist Liu Ping, a native of Xinyu, Jiangxi Province, and her attempted inroads to campaign for women’s rights, the article discusses Liu’s outspoken behavior in response to an ugly marginalization of gender and identity. In the article, which appeared in early March, reporter Didi Kirsten Tatlow quotes Liu as saying, “Women in China have no status.” 

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"Though I Am Gone" (dir. Hu Jie)

In The Guardian, Tania Branigan profiles an ongoing project of artist Xu Weixin–to complete a series of over one hundred painting of individuals whose lives were perversely impacted by the Cultural Revolution, both “accuser[s] and accused.”

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"Meishi Street" (dir. Ou Ning)

The demolition of hutong neighborhoods in Beijing to make way for modern high-rises and other spoils of “development” has been well documented for years. Ou Ning‘s documentary Meishi Street, which traces a group of Beijingers’ attempt to resist the the onslaught of urban reconfiguring anticipating the 2008 Olympics, is prominent in the canon of documentation of these historic communities reduced to rubble.

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An underpinning of democratic participation may have led to the end of the TV hit "Super Girls" (courtesy Getty Images)

The recent Presidential elections in Taiwan have been a hot topic in Chinese discussion circles, not only due to observations of how differently politicians are treated in democratic Taiwan, but also because access to news of the democratic process down south has been surprisingly unrestrained in both state media and online. Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times reports:

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"Tape" (dir. Li Ning)

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph 

A fleet of masked vigilantes are taking Beijing—and leaving a trail of public spectacle in their wake. A trend of “superhero mimicry” growing popular in Beijing was recently reported on by J. David Goodman for the New York Times‘s Lede blog. These anonymous good Samaritans, adopting names like “The Incredible Shining Knight” and “Chinese Redbud Woman,” have been running wild on the streets of Beijing–and all over weibo and baidu blogs–engaging in small acts of public benevolence.

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"Struggle" (dir. Shu Haolun)

Shenzhen’s Foxconn factory, made famous last year by a trend of worker suicides that created a global moment of uncomfortable horror, is probably the most well-known factory in the world. Employing hundreds of thousands of young Chinese migrants and manufacturing a huge chunk of the world’s electronics—including the hand-crafting of Apple products—the controversy surrounding the Foxconn factory have been painted as a perfect storm of corporate corruption, the absence of protective labor laws and worker’s rights in China, and the imbalanced hypocrisy of a world with an exponential demand for electronics.

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Zhou Hao presents "The Transition Period"

In the wake of the now-disbanded protests in Wukan, much attention has been paid to the somewhat unconventional methods employed by Wang Yang, the CCP secretary of Guangdong Province. The New York Times‘s Sharon LaFraniere reports:

Mr. Wang, the up-and-coming Communist Party secretary of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, faced a political turning point when 13,000 irate residents of Wukan evicted their leaders and barricaded themselves in their coastal village for 13 days in a last-straw uprising against local corruption.

Given a choice of storming the village with armed police officers or conceding that the villagers’ complaints had merit, Mr. Wang chose the latter. And in a single morning, he defused a standoff that had drawn unflattering worldwide news coverage.

The decision won him praise in the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, which called it an act of “political courage” in a tense situation. Some analysts said it might have strengthened his already strong prospects to land a seat on China’s elite ruling body, the nine-member Standing Committee of the party’s Politburo, when a wave of mandatory retirements vacates seven of the seats this coming year.

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