Joseph Kahn

The execution was meant to show that Beijing is serious about improving the safety of Chinese products.

Lake Tai, the center of China’s ancient “land of fish and rice,” succumbed this year to floods of man-made waste. By then, the activist who had been trying to save the lake was in jail.

The National Center for the Performing Arts, a $400 million complex, has attracted at least as much attention for its cost overruns, safety concerns and provocative aesthetics.

In this memoir, Lijia Zhang describes coming of age in 1980s China.

Why did the Chinese authorities react so strongly against an exercise society?

An argument that China will displace the United States as a superpower and upend our notions of modernity.

Two scholars argue that the humiliation of defeat by foreigners has been a nationalist rallying cry in modern China.

Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.

Photographers captured historic moments of war, grief and wonder that defined the year.

Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, reflects on some of our most probing recent work.