Last week, the Chinese government announced that it will raise the retirement age. The long-expected move is deeply unpopular but, the government holds, necessary to relieve strain on China’s work force and pension funds. The...
News of plans to raise China’s retirement age, found in documents issued after the recently concluded Third Plenum, have ignited a social media firestorm. The text of the plenum’s “resolution,” published to Xinhua, held:...
Chinese netizens have had a lot to say about economist Ma Jiantang’s prescription for adapting to the “era of longevity” by reclassifying workers between the ages of 60-70 as “the youthful elderly,” those between the ages of...
In part two of our look back at the most notable censored articles of 2023, as selected by CDT’s Chinese editorial team, we present five more articles on such diverse subjects as poverty among older migrant workers, proposed...
In part two of our retrospective on the most sensitive topics of 2023, as selected by our Chinese team, we focus on dissent and disasters. In part one we covered long-standing taboos on discussions about Xi Jiping and the...
This week, a striking series of infographics meant to highlight social issues such as poverty, disability, depression, youth unemployment, and elder care were scrubbed from Weibo, leaving only the blank gray boxes that Weibo...
The “White-haired Movement” (白发运动, Báifà Yùndòng) refers to protests led by elderly and retired workers in Wuhan and Dalian in February 2023, and in Guangzhou in January 2023. The protesters were objecting to medical insurance...
A news article lauding the police work behind the arrest of a 64-year-old construction worker in Shanghai’s Pudong district instead drew attention to the financial insecurity experienced by China’s elderly workers. The...
On February 15, just weeks before the opening of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) legislative session in Beijing, thousands of Chinese retirees in the cities of Wuhan and Dalian held large demonstrations against...
Surveillance in Chinese cities is ubiquitous, with highly visible security cameras trained on most every intersection, public space, and building, but over the past decade, it has been seeping into the countryside as well. In an...
Even before the lifting of China’s long-standing “zero-COVID” policy in early December of last year, there were signs of a surge in Omicron cases nationwide. Since then, China has experienced a tsunami of infections—first in...
China’s recent COVID-19 wave has left patients and their families struggling with medical debt. A Peking University study estimated that as of January 11, 900 million people in China had been infected with COVID-19, and China’s...
On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission announced ten new pandemic-related guidelines, signaling an easing of the nation’s long-running “zero-COVID” policy (also referred to euphemistically as “dynamic clearance”). The...
While Xi Jinping may profess confidence that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” China’s birth rates are rapidly diminishing. Recently released official statistics suggest continued deepening of looming demographic...
“Voices of July” continues CDT’s monthly “Voices of …” collection of viral and censored audio-visual content from all over China. Inspired by the original audio-visual compilation “Voices of April,” which was the target of...
A viral video about a 66-year-old disabled rural man weathering adversity with resourcefulness and optimism has touched the hearts of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens—and touched off a complex debate about poverty,...
On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) criticized China’s zero-COVID policy and called on the government to transition to another strategy for dealing with the pandemic. The move was poorly received by the Chinese...
Since the lockdown in Shanghai began five weeks ago, numerous video and audio recordings about the suffering of people in Shanghai have circulated online, and many have been censored. “Voices of April,” a six-minute viral video...
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