Beijing Fashion Week opens: China Chic owns the runway - CGTN
Beijing Fashion Week is officially here – and it's opening with a BANG! Taking center stage: a China Chic powerhouse turning ancient crafts into modern masterpieces. Exquisite embroidery? Check. Stunning silhouettes? Double check. And Shen Li has the best seat in the house. Come with her!
America’s China Talent Challenge: Investing in Deeper American Understanding of China
USCET’s Expert Working Group Report Launch
Join USCET for the official public launch of its expert working group report, “America’s China Talent Challenge: Investing in Deeper American Understanding of China.”
March 23 | 10:00 - 11:30 AM ET, Hybrid on Zoom
As U.S. student presence in China remains below pre-pandemic levels, the long-term pipeline of Chinese language skills, field research experience, and policy expertise continues to face significant challenges. Convened in fall 2025, USCET’s expert working group engaged more than 50 organizations and individuals across the United States and China to develop concrete, actionable recommendations to reverse this decline and support the continued development of China expertise.
Please join us in person or online to hear working group leaders Mark Lambert, David M. Lampton, Neysun Mahboubi, Jean Oi, and Madelyn Ross discuss key findings from the report and explore actionable ways to rebuild the next generation of American China expertise. This conversation will be moderated by USCET Executive Director Rosie Levine, and will feature virtual opening remarks from former U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.
SHEIN Muzzles Chinese Media - by Zichen Wang - Pekingnology
… Outside China, there is still a reflexive tendency to imagine “the Chinese media” as a single, monolithic propaganda machine, as though everything that appears or disappears online must ultimately be the work of the state. But China’s actual media environment is much more fragmented than that. Millions of blogs and video channels, mostly run by individuals or very small teams, exist on top of giant commercial platforms. That makes them vulnerable not only to government rules, but also to the platforms’ own systems, their uneven enforcement, and the “complaint” machinery that powerful companies can learn to exploit.
Reading China through its most courageous reporting
Announced on 28 February 2026 via the WeChat blog of Liu Hu 刘虎, a veteran investigative journalist, the winners of the 7th Journalists Home News Prize offer a rare guide to some of the strongest Chinese journalism still being produced today. In stark contrast to the state-run China Journalism Award, organised annually by the state-run All-China Journalists Association, the grassroots, non-governmental journalism award created by journalists themselves outside the state honours system this year recognised reporting on rape, domestic violence, toxic pollution, rural pensions, medical waste, and unjust coercive practices in the handling of criminal cases.
Senior economist warns that China's consumption is being misread, growth is being misdiagnosed, and fiscal caution is holding back the economy.
Chinese countryside’s quieter strains - by Yuxuan JIA
A Hunan homecoming finds shrinking work, falling wages, and skewed sex ratios—which fuels brokered marriages to Vietnamese women and a rise in transactional sex.
China’s high-end industries keep chalking up technical breakthroughs. But one Spring Festival trip back to the countryside suggests that, at least in some parts of the country, many people are still waiting to feel the benefits. In a personal homecoming essay, the author describes a local economy where casual work has dried up, wages feel under pressure, and many low-skilled workers face increasingly precarious ways of getting by.
The social fallout, as seen through the author’s hometown, is equally stark. Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.
The article was published on Cherry Big House 樱桃大房子’s personal WeChat blog on 1 March 2026. Cherry Big House is a social media commentator with a focus on the property market. By 7 March, this article had been read more than 46,000 times.
Oversight of China’s industry intensifies, with carmakers urged to move beyond discounts and focus on chips and self-driving systems
China’s recent changes to the rules governing its global payment system could pave the way for turning it into a genuine alternative to Western networks, according to a new report.
Beijing now appears to be moving towards building the Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) into a global platform compliant with multicurrency settlements and other foreign payment channels, said the study led by Ju Jiandong, a chair professor at Tsinghua University’s PBC School of Finance.
Beijing recently undertook the first major update to the business rules governing the CIPS – which previously focused on yuan-denominated payments – in eight years, with the new version coming into effect in February.
World-leading Vietnamese mathematician Ngo Bao Chau has said his decision to leave the US was not just the result of the worsening academic environment there, but also a vision to transform Asia into the next global powerhouse for maths and science.
Ngo, the first Vietnamese recipient of the prestigious Fields Medal, will join the University of Hong Kong in June.
“I want Asia to be the next America or the next Europe [as] a place where science and mathematics strive,” he said in an interview on the university’s ca
This weekly newsletter is put together by DeLisle Worrell, President of the ABCF. Visit us at Association for Barbados China Friendship | (abcf-bb.com).
Thanks to everyone who sent contributions for this week’s Update. Please send items of interest to me via the contact page at ABCF-BB.com or to info@DeLisleWorrell.com
The ABCF mission is to build a deeper understanding between the Chinese people and Barbadians and Caribbean people from all walks of life. The association’s focus is on personal experiences, people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and exchanges of ideas, and the facilitation of travel, business and study. From the outset we aim to learn from and build on the experiences of the Caribbean and China, and to develop mutual understandings and support that will be to the benefit of both sides.
