Photo Essay: “My Hourly Wage”
As the Chinese economy continues to recover from the long pandemic (and post-pandemic) slowdown,...
May 13, 2024
As the Chinese economy continues to recover from the long pandemic (and post-pandemic) slowdown,...
May 2, 2024
Today’s CDT Quote of the Day is a response to the recent tide of online public discussion about the new “adjusted leave” (调休, tiáoxiū) holiday schedule that has lengthened certain Chinese public holidays, while at the same time...
Apr 26, 2024
The European Parliament voted this week in favor of regulations to ban the sale, import, and export of goods made using forced labor. While the ban does not explicitly target any single country, it is widely seen as responding...
Apr 15, 2024
At an April 8 press conference to unveil IM Motors’ new L6 electric sedan, company CEO Liu Tao enumerated the many sacrifices his workers had made, which suggested to some observers that the company’s punishing schedules were...
Feb 14, 2024
Margaret Hillenbrand, professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, joined CDT to discuss her two latest books: “On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China” (2023) and “Negative Exposures: Knowing...
Feb 2, 2024
A set of reports published this week provide more detail about the brutality of repression against Uyghur women and the pervasiveness of forced labor in Xinjiang that taints global supply chains. Accompanying these revelations...
Jan 8, 2024
Today’s quote is a rumination on the fatal stabbing of a delivery man in Qingdao. In early December, a neighborhood security guard stabbed a food delivery man during a conflict about whether the latter could park his moped...
Jul 14, 2023
A CCTV report posted to Bilibili celebrating construction workers laboring in extreme heat came under severe criticism online this week. The report focused on workers in Xiong’an, Xi Jinping’s pet urban development...
Jul 6, 2023
On the surface, neither the film “Barbie” nor a write-up of an academic’s research on migrant laborer poverty would seem to have anything to do with the South China Sea. Yet both are embroiled in censorship controversies related...
May 24, 2023
Exactly one year ago, a consortium of media outlets released the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of tens of thousands of files showing images of Uyghur detainees in Xinjiang’s concentration camps and manuals for enforcing their...
May 19, 2023
On May 18, a social media post (archived here) announced the impending closure and demolition of a well-known museum dedicated to documenting the lives and improving the welfare of China’s migrant workers. The Museum of Working...
Sep 15, 2022
On Wednesday, the European Commission officially released its proposal for banning products made with forced labor from entering EU markets. While the proposed regulation does not single out a specific country, it is widely seen...
Aug 19, 2022
A report released this week by UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery Tomoya Obokata stated that it is “reasonable to conclude” that there is forced labor in Xinjiang, and that certain instances of it “may amount...
Feb 15, 2022
On Friday, the International Labor Organization (ILO) released its annual report on member nations’ compliance with international labor standards. The 870-page report, written by a 20-person committee of independent...
Feb 11, 2022
A Bilibili content moderator’s death has renewed debate on China’s culture of overwork six months after the Supreme People’s Court ruled “996” working schedules illegal, and just a year after a young tech worker died in similar...
Sep 1, 2021
The Supreme People’s Court has ruled the much-reviled “996” 72-hour work week illegal. The January death of a 22-year-old Pinduoduo employee after working a late shift focused public anger on 996 overtime culture,...
May 12, 2021
May Day was conceived as a celebration of the eight-hour work day by a coalition of socialists and labor activists in fin de siècle Europe. Over a century later, Shenzhen’s Communist Party Committee commemorated May Day by...
May 10, 2021
Several new reports focusing on the invasive ways that the Chinese government is policing the bodies and lives of Uyghurs in the region have provided yet more evidence of ongoing crimes against humanity and genocide in Xinjiang....