China's Democracy Wall

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese VietCong guerrillas built a vast network of tunnels in the south of the country as part of the insurgency against the South Vietnamese government and their American allies. The tunnel network was a key base and shelter for the North Vietna ...  Show more

In the summer of 1978, many Swedish workers relished the chance to take longer, paid vacations than ever before.This was thanks to an update to Sweden’s Annual Leave Act –or Semesterlagen in Swedish – passed the previous year. The law guaranteed all employees four consecutive wee ...  Show more

In 1957 the Chinese Communist leader Chairman Mao made a speech encouraging criticism of his Communist system saying 'Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend'. We hear from Harry Wu, who made his views known and ended up in prison for nearly twenty y ...  Show more

Accused of leaking state secrets, journalist Lei Cheng was imprisoned in China for more than three years, where she was detained in tight quarters and kept under constant supervision. “Freedom is wasted on the free,” she says, recounting how she and fellow inmates found joy in th ...  Show more

There has been a slow strangling of freedom in the territory where pro-democracy activists have been convicted; an annual vigil for the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing in 1989 has been replaced by a food fair. A boom in startups suggests America is recovering ...  Show more

Max Pearson gets a first-hand account of how the minority Uyghur community in China staged some of the first protests against the all-powerful Communist Party in the 1980s. Plus, the young lawyer who won the landmark Roe v Wade abortion rights case in the US, the chemistry of ...