Excerpt

Fighting for Home

After 14 years of war in Syria, Damascus fell to the rebels in December 2024. Fighting with them was a small but critical cohort of Uyghurs, who had fled China and joined the battle. But once the war was won, could they find a home so far from their homeland?

Inside the Camps

In 1991, a CBS investigation into China’s reform-through-labor camps shocked the world, exposing how prison-made goods were being exported to the U.S. Three decades later, camps like it still exist.

China’s Industrial Parks in Africa

Beijing is investing heavily in Ethiopia, helping to run Special Economic Zones similar to China's own. But African workers are questioning whether the states of legal exception and national indignity that they creates are worth the development it brings.

From the Archive

A New World Disorder?

With Pax Americana crumbling, many countries in the Global South are turning to Pax Sinica as an alternative. So what are Chinese thinkers' vision for its place on the world stage, in such uncertain and changing times?

The Missing Pages

Sixty years after the Cultural Revolution began, a writer looks back to her childhood in Beijing during its peak, and the banned books that sustained her through the tumult.