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.

A commission is investigating complaints by military academy students who say systematic sexual abuse was inflicted on new recruits dating back to the 1970s.

Chen Guang is now an artist, and since early May, he has been held in police detention after staging a performance that was a comment on attempts to expunge the Tiananmen Square massacre from history.

Students were the driving force behind the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijing. China's youth now have other worries, the events of 25 years ago forgotten and buried by time and the government.

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.

Banned during the Cultural Revolution, China's ancient funeral practices are re-emerging — but with new twists. One of China's most famous professional mourners creates modern funerals with Chinese characteristics — burning paper money, wailing and prostrating, karaoke eulogies and strobe lights.

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.

In 2011, police detained Ai Weiwei for 81 days. Now, he's released a song that's turned the experience into a heavy metal protest song, along with a dystopian nightmare video. The lyrics are explicit and angry. Ai says his music is for the many political prisoners who remain jailed.

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.

A massive 2008 temblor in Sichuan province killed some 90,000 Chinese and pointed to the poor construction practices in China. The rebuilding effort was supposed to showcase modern China. But today, many survivors are angry over what they say is official corruption, ranging from poor construction and unpaid workers to bribes and improper compensation for seized land.