Tag: Children and Childhood

Three Is Best: How China’s Family Planning Propaganda Has Changed

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For decades, China harshly restricted the number of children couples could have, arguing that everyone would be better off with fewer mouths to feed. The government’s one-child policy was woven into the fabric of everyday life, through slogans on street banners and in popular culture and public art. Now, faced with a shrinking and aging population, China is using many of the same propaganda channels to send the opposite message: Have more babies. The government has also been offering financial incentives for couples to have two or three children. But…

W.H.O. Asks China for Details on Surge of Respiratory Illness in Children

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The World Health Organization has formally requested that China share detailed information about a recent increase in respiratory illnesses, citing unconfirmed media reports of undiagnosed pneumonia in children. China has been reporting a jump in respiratory illnesses for months. Chinese media reports have described long lines at pediatric hospitals, and doctors have said that this year’s wave appeared to be more severe than those of previous years. Chinese officials have attributed the illnesses to known pathogens such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2 — the virus behind the coronavirus pandemic — and mycoplasma…

Ed Young Dies at 91; Infused His Illustrations With Chinese Tradition

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Ed Young, whose illustrations in some 100 children’s books, many of which he also wrote, mesmerized young and not-so-young readers with intricate depictions of fairy tales, poetry and his own life story as a Chinese immigrant, died on Sept. 29 at his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 91. His daughter Antonia Young confirmed the death. Mr. Young trained as an architect and worked as a graphic designer; he never intended to become an illustrator of children’s books. But a chance opportunity to work on the book “The Mean Mouse…

TikTok Fined by European Union for Mishandling Child Data

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TikTok was fined roughly $370 million on Friday by European Union regulators for having weak safeguards to protect the personal information of children using the platform, a sign of increased scrutiny facing the social media service. TikTok’s default setting did not adequately protect children’s privacy, nor was the company transparent in explaining what it was doing with the data of users age 17 and younger, according to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which issued the penalty on behalf of the European Union. The fine of 345 million euros is the first…

China Helped Raise My American Kids, and They Turned Out Fine

Chin@Strategy

When Covid was raging across the world a couple of years ago, I came across a picture online of an American woman wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I refuse to co-parent with the government” — a response to perceived government overreach regarding school mask mandates. I laughed out loud: My own kids were, in a way, co-parented by the Chinese government. My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government…

In Shanghai, Covid Is Separating Parents From Children

Chin@Strategy

Photos and video that showed young children isolated from their families and crying at a Shanghai hospital led to an outburst of anger online on Saturday, as China’s largest city struggled to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious Omicron version of the coronavirus. In the images, a series of hospital cribs, each holding several young children, appeared to be parked in the hallway of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the city’s Jinshan district. A video showed several of the children crying. The images and video could not…

China Calls on ‘Little Inoculated Warriors’ in Its War on Covid-19

Chin@Strategy

As the rest of the world struggles to vaccinate adults in the face of a threat from a new coronavirus variant, China has embarked on an ambitious campaign that it says will give the country better protection against Covid-19: full inoculation of 160 million of its youngest citizens by the end of the year. The campaign — powered in part with red flower stickers, balloons and boxes of toys for children who step up to become what nurses call “little inoculated warriors”— has gotten off to a fast start. In…

‘All About My Sisters’ Review: Family Matters

Chin@Strategy

Often in “All About My Sisters,” the Chinese filmmaker Wang Qiong’s documentary portrait of her family, you might forget that what you’re watching is filtered through a camera. Over a period of seven years, Wang filmed her parents, siblings and relatives from within the emotional thicket of their lives, capturing moments of piercing, private intimacy. Her approach yields a film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors. There’s plenty to warrant this bitterness, starting with the fact that Wang’s younger sister, Zhou Jin,…