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One readily accessible article from the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post is here:
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/health-beauty/article/1903395/chinas-organic-food-boom-driven-personal

A consulting company produced this study: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-health-foods-market-makes-attractive-foreign-investors/

Sixth Tone, a Chinese state media outlet that often does great work, has a more recent article: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003165/greener-pastures-chinas-fraught-relationship-with-organic-food

One of the websites I recommended to Aleida on the environment is China Dialogue. It has an article about organic food in China: https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/10354-China-s-middle-class-gets-a-taste-for-healthy-eating

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The Farewell is available from Amazon Prime. If you're a Prime member, you can stream it for free. If not, you can stream it for $3. It's available from Google Play and others for $3 to $5. Because it is an American film (though the director and cast are Chinese), you can't use it for your film review. Nonetheless, many really enjoy the film and I mention here because it is about relations across generational lines. The film grew out of a segment on This American Life. The trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgJT_9IGqsA.

The film did reasonably well at the box office for an independent film, earning $18 million in North America. It wasn't screened widely in China, earning just $550,000. Here's an LA Times review by Justin Chang: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-the-farewell-review-awkwafina-20190709-story.html 
Here's an excerpt:
"The more complicated truth — one that goes to the heart of this wise, emotionally generous movie — is that Billi is a woman caught between two worlds. Her defiance may be a product of Western individualism (and so, some might argue, are her writerly aspirations and her empty bank account). But it is also a sign of her fierce devotion to a family that means everything to her."

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Benjamin - you're completely right about people having more choices. That's the subject of our discussion for week 3. My bottom line is that the party still cares about some things and is absolutist on those things, but has found it easier to control a few things than to try to control everything. It has discovered that letting people make many of their own choices is a good thing for them and has stimulated many positive changes. BUT - there are limits to the flexibility and we'll talk about that as well. Religious freedom -- yes, but also no if you build the church too big or develop too passionate a following (e.g., Falungong).

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Kelly's noted Iron Man Wang, a hard working hero who died of cancer in 1970. In many instances, the best heros for the purposes of propaganda are dead ones. Another selfless fellow made into a national hero is Lei Feng. Lei's star may have passed, however, two bio-pics about him died at the box office (2013). Even state media noticed: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/766438.shtml.

It would take a lot more space to talk about the big companies that are mentioned here. The Chinese state doesn't own most of the big private sector internet companies (BAT - Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent), but the ownership of Huawei is murkier. ZTE is state owned. Here's an Education about Asia article on these companies: https://www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/chinas-national-champions-alibaba-tencent-and-huawei.pdf
 

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China's government has always wanted world-beating companies. It wants its SOEs to be top flight. And in terms of building out the telecommunications infrastructure, they have done that. But most of Chinese state owned companies are capital intensive (they don't employ that many people) and are not especially profitable. China's private sector has managed to grow rapidly and to reinvest profits productively. It employs far more people. This disappoints the party-state, but since they are able to control (though not really direct) private companies through regulations (e.g., Alibaba would have to shut down if the party-state lifted its licenses to do business) and by having key personnel within the party and having the party represented at the company. Nick Lardy's two recent books get at this dilemma: the first Markets over Mao is about the rise of the private sector, but his most recent book is The State Strikes Back. Xi Jinping wants greater control and has promoted the state at the expense of the private sector. China's private sector, however, isn't always efficient (e.g., real estate development, over capacity in autos and solar panels).

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Alison - the trade war had relatively little national impact on either economy, but specific sectors were dramatically hit both in China and in the US. A big impact in the US was (and is -- most of the tariffs are still in place) increasing the costs on component parts for American manufacturers. Some US manufacturers, though, benefitted because they could raise their prices because those who bought from their competitors had to pay higher prices due to tariffs.

Within China, the impact on some exporters was significant. Their exports to the US suddenly became pricier. But that raises another question - many of the biggest importers from China are American companies! This is why Tim Cook of Apple lobbied the White House hard to keep tariffs away from his company's products. But if you look at the prices of American-branded goods from China (e.g., GE, RCA, Black and Decker and so on), you'll see that they probably went up. The pain of import tariffs is carried by the seller or importer in the short term, but eventually the consumer, in this case, Americans, paid the higher cost. This became a kind of consumption tax.

Some American producers may have lost some of their buyers in China. Wine and nuts from California, soybeans from Illinois, pork from Virginia and Missouri. BMWs (yes) from South Carolina.

We'll talk more about this the week after next.

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As Gina notes, the change in China is dramatic and for some it has been difficult. There were some in the 1990s who were plunged into early retirement/unemployment and found life extremely challenging. There are many who have worked hard to simply keep up. Most people have a higher standard of material living than they or their parents did. Alienation, however, is a giant problem, especially for those who have migrated great distances and live on the margins of cities.

Kevin talks about the rural/urban gap, which has generally widened since 1984, but inequality is a also giant issue within cities. Here's an article that looks at some of the policy changes in the effort to address poverty: https://www.socsci.uci.edu/~dorjsoli/China%20Perspectives%20pub%20version%20May%202017.pdf
 

Here are two presentations about poverty alleviation from our Finding Solutions conference: https://china.usc.edu/watch-presentations-poverty-alleviation-panel-china-finding-solutions-conference

 

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Billie's right about the priority of the Belt and Road within China and how nervous it has made some outside China. For the US, we've been engaged in both the public and private sectors in SE Asia a lot and to a lesser extent in much of Africa and Central Asia. However much the US occasionally talks about infrastructure, in recent years the US federal government has not done much. (And some of what it did, in response to the financial crisis of 2008, ended up being criticized by some -- here's a less partisan assessment by the Congressional Budget Office: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/43014)

But the US has done big infrastructure projects in the past (building canals, rail systems, power grid, highway systems) and we continue to benefit from those investments. Stay tuned for BRI results.

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There were multiple reasons to locate the special economic zones in Guangdong province. At that time, Guangdong had the closest ties to Hong Kong and the wider diaspora. It was Hong Kong and overseas Chinese who powered the initial opening up. Multinational giants came in later. Distance from Beijing was probably appreciated by all sides, but the key idea was to tap external capital, technical expertise, and market connections. Fujian and Taiwan would function this way as well, though not as quickly.

On the Canton Fair:
An anonymous Pakistani from 1962, 1968
http://www.cantonfair.org.cn/en/common/detail.aspx?oid=10363

Stats (according to the folks running the fair)
http://pdc.cantonfair.org.cn/html/cantonfair/en/about/2012-09/138.shtml

A CIA report from 1968:
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00875R001600010004-6.pdf

Illustrated Chinese account (on Zhihu, the Chinese Quora):
https://www.zhihu.com/question/19600438

Propaganda painting displayed at the 1968 fair:
http://www.sohu.com/a/217006804_651410

Ministry of Commerce offical history of the fair
http://history.mofcom.gov.cn/?page_id=2168
 

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Anything in English is aimed at foreign audiences. The 13.5 video was intended to help foreigners understand the process and scope of the five year plan. As you note, the video doesn't get into any of the specifics of the plan. Check out the documents section of our website to see the plan as well as discussion of it. https://china.usc.edu/resources/documents/all

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Benjamin raises several points. We're looking at how the party-state has evolved over time. The hukou system is not as controlling as it once was, but still affects life chances and choices. The party is not as present in many people's lives as it was even thirty or twenty years ago. Until the early 1990s, your school leaders assigned you jobs. While that meant you didn't have to hunt for a position, it also meant that you had little say in where you were assigned. Life is very different today -- and for many this means less certainty than before. Socialism with Chinese characteristics means that in economics, there is greater reliance on the market to allocate resources and rewards. People have more latitude in how they choose to live. But in politics, the CCP remains firmly in charge and it intends to remain as the ruling power.

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A lot could be said about these matters, but let me just offer a couple of observations.
China and Mao weren't happy with Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, nor were they happy about the Soviet invasion of Hungary at that time. They were not willing to coincide socialist leadership to anyone. The break only became open in 1958-59 and the 1960s. Here is a collection of translated documents on the break: https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/73/sino-soviet-split-1960-1984.

Here's a good article on how antagonism bubbled during a visit the Soviet chief made to China in 1958.

On Deng Xiaoping - he was convinced that they had to do something to enliven the economy. Lenin's NEP was similar, but Deng's reforms went much, much farther. One thing they had in common, though, was Armand Hammer.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/29/magazine/the-riddle-of-armand-hammer.html
 

Project opens: https://apnews.com/e7e426083ca93fc68a24fea100c6a1d3
 

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Amir is correct that 人民日报, People's Daily is the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. Global Times is owned by the People's Daily and makes more money that the parent paper. China Daily is also part of the propaganda apparatus, something that is pretty easily discerned. Poverty alleviation is part of the CCP's great claims and it is also a current priority, which is why it was featured in the ad in the British newspaper. Acknowledging all that - China has succeeding in greatly reducing dire poverty, brink of subsistence poverty, among many people. It may be more accurate, however, to say that China's government made policy choices that allowed people, through their own work and enterprise to move ahead. The main poverty alleviation policy for the past twenty years has been to encourage people to move to the city and find better paying work. But that approach is probably nearly tapped out, so now there's an effort to develop tourism and other businesses to improve the lives of the rural poor. Still, there are many in China who are poor and live in the city. Here is a discussion of how some solve their housing challenges: https://china.usc.edu/watch-presentation-housing-panel-china-finding-solutions-conference

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One excellent, but now dated, resource is Judith Banister's Population of China. It came out in the mid-1980s. It is very good on the programs of the 1950s that brought infant mortality down. High school students might also find the "midwife" chapter from Gail Hershatter's The Gender of Memory to be useful. It's online at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cache/h/e/b/heb33176.0001.001/00000178.tif.28.pdf#page=9;zoom=75 

We interviewed Gail about the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLf0C3P28L0&list=PLZoSvm2n7tkcvAsbeBYYi_yNW3WiisD51&index=33

And the US National Library of Medicine has a nice set of materials on propaganda posters and health campaigns: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/education/chinesepublichealthposters/highereducation/class4.html

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Many schools and library systems support Kanopy. The service has many foreign films and documentaries:

https://www.kanopy.com/

One of the films they offer is Last Train Home, please watch it.
 

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