Louisa Lim

Jiang Zemin rose to power in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests and leaves a legacy of economic reforms — but also tight political control.

The inventor of Pinyin, a system that converted Chinese characters into words with the Roman alphabet, died on Saturday. Zhou Youguang was 111 years old.

The bloody 1989 crackdown in Beijing changed China, NPR's Louisa Lim explains in a new book. She also chronicles the brutal repression that took place in another city — and remained hidden until now.

In his haunting new graphic novel, cartoonist Xie Peng, 36, captures a psychological journey into the world of young Chinese. He worked for six years on the book, which renders a landscape of competition, anxiety and stress, and where everything, including dignity, is a commodity.

Some super-rich Chinese are sending their kids to weekend classes in order to learn how to deal with money. The lessons include things like a charity sale designed to teach the children compassion, sharing and the value of money.

Natural disasters make the headlines. But we rarely hear how the survivors are doing years later. Here's the story of Zhang Ming, who suffered devastating losses in the 2008 earthquake in China's Sichuan province.

Hundreds of police were deployed in southern Beijing Wednesday to quell a large protest after a migrant worker fell to her death at a clothing mall. Police say it was suicide, but there are reports the woman was gang-raped by security guards. Her family is asking for a proper investigation.

After local authorities got word of a planned environmental protest in the southwestern city of Chengdu, they decided to make Saturday a workday. Security personnel, meanwhile, converged on the city center in a display of force.

Chinese leaders and the state-run media keep talking about the Chinese dream. So NPR's Beijing bureau asked the Chinese to define their dreams. Here's what they said.

Touted in the state-run media, "the Chinese dream" is Beijing's latest official slogan. The man who made the phrase famous says it means China becoming the world's No. 1 superpower. But as censors scrub unapproved versions of the concept from the Internet, people wonder: Just whose dream is it anyway?