Essays and Features

Zheng Qing was devastated when she heard the news last month that China will scrap the one-child policy. It was too late to have a second child. She thought it was a great honour to follow the one child policy at that time but now feels the rule has let her down badly.

She and her husband are among more than a million grieving Chinese parents who have lost the only child that the government allowed them to have. 

Zheng’s husband, Fan Guohi, 56, has petitioned the government to give „shidu“ parents, those who have lost their only child, both moral and financial support. Their son died from a car accident in 2012. His loss left the couple „emotionally ruined“, Zheng said.

„One-child families are walking a tightrope,“ Fan said. „Once you lose your child, you lose all hope.“

Read the whole article and see more pictures on Wider Image Reuters:

https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/china-when-an-only-child-dies

„Kim Kyung-Hoon studied photojournalism at a university in South Korea before beginning his career at a local newspaper. In 2002 he joined Reuters‘ bureau in Seoul as a staff photographer and is currently based in Beijing after working for six years in the Tokyo bureau. He has covered a range of stories from the daily spot news, political news and disaster stories to sports events.“

Wider Image: In-depth visual reports from across the world by Reuters, the world’s largest news agency. Updated daily with new stories.

While China’s economic downturn is providing some respite from the labor crunch, Crystal’s blue-jeans factory here still pays 20% above the market rate. It organizes cooking classes and singing contests to keep workers happy. 

Last month, China announced it was abolishing its decades-old policy restricting most couples to one child. But that won’t likely put much of a dent in the country’s looming demographic problem because relatively few Chinese prefer to have more than one child, economists note—and it will be at least 16 years before any additional babies make it to the job market.

Fearing that China will see an exodus of manufacturers, Chinese Communist Party Chief Xi Jinping last year called for “an industrial robot revolution” in China, which has become the world’s largest market for automation.

Looking ahead to 2050, the future appears mixed for consumers around the globe. Low-cost production in China has helped suppress inflation in the U.S., Europe and at home. It is an open question whether automation can hold down costs as effectively as Chinese peasant labor did. But consumers should look forward to more choice, faster delivery and, perhaps, less harm to the environment. (By KATHY CHU and BOB DAVIS for WSJ)

The whole article and more pictures on Wall Street Journal:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-chinas-workforce-dwindles-the-world-scrambles-for-alternatives-1448293942

Gilles Sabrié is an editorial, portrait and corporate  photographer based in Beijing.
He has worked for over a decade in East and South-East Asia, documenting the staggering change the region has been going through. His work has been published in numerous publications worldwide, among many others, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Time magazine, Geo, National,  Geographic, Der Spiegel, L’Espresso, The Observer, The Guardian… His corporate clients include among others, Apple, Nestlé, Mc Kinsey…

(Vietnam, 2015). Fifty years ago it began the war against USA. Forty years ago, with the conquest of Saigon the North, Vietnamese Army won the war and thousands of veterans came back to their villages trying to start a new life. Today, just in Huè (Central Vietnam) which was one of the more hit part of the country by the fighting, close to the DMZ zone, there were settled 25.000 veterans, 4.000 of them are invalid and 2.000 victims of the Agent Orange. They have a lot of problems to solve, as how to build a new life with their families.

In fact, many Veterans didn’t get married at that time. But the entire community welcomed them as heroes, in particular North Vietnamese, while in the south the situation was different because of the long presence of the American Army there. South Veteran’s Families were scared of the revenges but after some years the situation was changed and the harmony was established again. Today, after 40 years, there are no longer distances and they live all together. – See more at: http://www.echophotojournalism.com/stories/once-we-were-soldiers#sthash.LFPKwBhh.dpuf

Karl Mancini
Since 2001 he has visited more than 80 countries, with a particular preference for Asia and South America,  following the socio-historical and political events , working as a freelance photojournalist and writer by focusing with particular attention issues such as child labor, violence against women, the tragic story of landmines (to which he have devoted years of work) and genocide that he documented  in 8 different countries. He studied photography in Rome, to achieve the Masterclass in contemporary journalism. Karl has joined Echo in 2015 as a staff photographer. – See more at: http://www.echophotojournalism.com/photographers/karl-mancini-1#sthash.AaYB1y6Z.dpuf