In the aftermath of the July 2009 protests in Xinjiang province, which according to the Chinese government killed at least 197 people, Chinese security forces detained hundreds of people on suspicion of participating in the unrest. Dozens of...
Interest rates in China comprise a mix of both market determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (lending and deposit rates), reflecting China's gradual process of interest rate liberalization. We...
This paper investigates the medium-term behavior of output following banking crises, and its association with pre- and post-crisis conditions and policies. The authors find that output tends to be depressed substantially following banking crises...
Financial authorities in East Asia have adopted a variety of foreign exchange rate policies, ranging from Hong Kong’s currency board system which links the Hong Kong dollar to the U.S. dollar, to the “independently floating” exchange rates of...
Human rights has been a principal area of U.S. concern in its relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly since the violent government crackdown on the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989. Some policy makers contend that...
Prisoner of the State is the secretly recorded memoir of Zhao Ziyang, once holder of China’s two highest Party and state positions and the architect of the economic reforms that have brought the country to the edge of great-power status...
Recent changes to China's financial system, in particular ongoing interest rate liberalization, gradual movement toward a more flexible exchange rate regime, and rapid development of capital markets, have changed substantially the environment in...
This is a report on the performance of two highway projects in China which were financed by a loan from the World Bank. The Tri-Provincial Highway Project, which links Gansu, Ningxi, and Inner Mongolia, and the Hubei-Xiaogan-Xiangfan Highway...
In 1979, official U.S. relations with Taiwan (the Republic of China) became a casualty of the American decision to recognize the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as China’s sole legitimate government. Since then, U.S. unofficial...
Over the past several years, China has enjoyed one of the world’s fastest growing economies and has been a major contributor to world economic growth. However, the current global financial crisis threatens to significantly slow China’s economy....
Through the ups and downs of the unpredictable Chinese Revolution, Zhou Enlai’s reputation has seemed to stand untarnished. The reasons for this are in part old-fashioned ones: in a world of violent change, not noted for its...
China is now by far the United States’ largest creditor. Its treasury portfolio recently surpassed that of Japan’s, and it has long held more agency (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) bonds than any other country. Never before has a nation as poor as...
China's significant health gains during the 1960s and 1970s earned worldwide recognition. Following onset of economic reforms in the 1980s, however, the primary health care system was weakened, reducing access to both curative and preventive...
U.S. government support of rule of law and civil society programs in the People’s Republic of China constitutes a key component of its efforts to promote democratic change in China. Other related U.S. activities include participation in official...
“The situation inside Tibet is almost like a military occupation,” I heard the Dalai Lama tell an interviewer last November, when I spent a week traveling with him across Japan. “Everywhere. Everywhere, fear, terror. I cannot remain indifferent...
Policy toward and support for Taiwan are a key element in U.S. relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and an important component of U.S. policy in Asia. Recently, pessimistic observers see growing PRC-Taiwan ties eroding U.S....
Congress and the Executive Branch have historically identified the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) as an important organization to help promote the U.S. goal of liberalizing international trade and investment in Asia, and possibly the...
Judging from the evidence of Michael Meyer’s portrait of life in a narrow backstreet of Beijing as China prepared for the Olympic Games, old Beijing has been vanishing for a very long time. “Peking you simply would not be able to recognize except...
U.S. policy on Tibet is governed by the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 (TPA), enacted as part of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of FY2003 (P.L. 107-228). In addition to establishing a number of U.S. principles with respect to human rights,...
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, affecting about 50 million people in the world, 85 percent of whom live in resource-poor countries. Epilepsy imposes an enormous physical, psychological, social and economic burden on...
On March 4, 2009, Barbara Finamore, Senior Attorney and China Program Director of the National Resources Defense Council, testified before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the United States House of...
In the late 1990s, Chinese peasants in the village of Da Fo, many of whom between 1959 and 1961 had survived the twentieth century’s greatest famine, felt free enough to install shrines to Guangong, the traditional war god of resistance to...
In the past several years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has bolstered its diplomatic presence and garnered international goodwill through its financing of infrastructure and natural resource development projects, assistance in the...
Providing their respective hopes and expectations on what they would like to see in the Obama administration’s China policy are Liu Xuecheng and Robert Oxnam, who both envision opportunities for reframing the China-U.S. relationship in a way that...
The United States of America and the People's Republic of China are both key players in international efforts to address global warming and global energy security. Indeed, they are by far the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the...
The document below, signed by more than two thousand Chinese citizens, was conceived and written in conscious admiration of the founding of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, where, in January 1977, more than two hundred Czech and Slovak...
U.S.-Taiwan relations have undergone important changes, sparked in part by the increasing complexity of Taiwan’s democratic political environment and the continued insistence of Beijing that the separately ruled Taiwan is a part of the People’s...
The world faces no greater challenge in the 21st century than arresting the rapidly increasing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that cause climate change. The two largest producers of these gases are the United States...
This paper examines the role of Japan against that of China in the exchange rate regime in East Asia in light of growing interest in forming a currency union in the region. The analysis suggests that currency unions with China tend to generate...
Over the last decade Chinese investment in Africa has grown considerably. This includes the financing of large infrastructural projects in many African countries. Although Chinese finance of African infrastructure is important, there is not much...
After a period of diplomatic rancor earlier this decade, Japan and China have demonstrably improved their bilateral relationship. The emerging detente includes breakthrough agreements on territorial disputes, various high-level exchanges, and...
Ian Buruma’s life would itself make a nice subject for a novel. His father was Dutch; his mother was British, from a family that emigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century; as an undergraduate in the Netherlands he focused on Chinese...
Hong Kong SAR's economic integration with the Mainland has primarily taken place in the Pearl River Delta (PRD). Taking stock of integration trends, this paper discusses key implications for ensuring economic benefits of further integration are...
We study the impact of a minimum wage on business cycle volatility, depending upon its coverage and adjustment mechanism. As with other small open economies, Hong Kong SAR is vulnerable to external shocks, with its exchange rate regime precluding...
This paper focuses on issues of drug rehabilitation practices in China. Chinese law dictates mandatory rehabilitation for drug users. Every year tens of thousands of drug users are sent—without trial or due process of law—to mandatory drug...
With much healthcare publicly funded, Hong Kong's rapidly aging population will significantly raise fiscal pressure over coming decades. The authors ask what the implications are of meeting these costs by public funding, or private funding...
Since the war on terrorism began in 2001 and the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and Global HIV/AIDS Initiative (GHAI) were launched in 2004, the United States has increased foreign aid spending dramatically in some regions, including East and...
U.S. officials saw relations with Taiwan as especially troubled during the 109th Congress in 2005-2006, beset by the increasing complexity and unpredictability of Taiwan’s democratic political environment as well as by PRC actions underscoring...
The current turmoil in global financial markets, which began with the American subprime crisis in 2007, has put market liberalism in a bad light.
But it was the socialization of risk—not private free markets—that precipitated the crisis....
China’s successful test of an anti-satellite weapon in 2007, followed by the US destruction earlier this year of an out-of-control American satellite, demonstrated that space may soon no longer remain a sanctuary from military conflict. As the...
According to conventional wisdom, the United States and China are locked in a high-stakes competition for energy resources around the world, particularly in Africa. Against the backdrop of highly volatile oil prices, mounting concerns about...
It is now a little over four hundred years since a scattering of Westerners first began to try to learn the Chinese language. Across that long span, the number of scholars studying Chinese has grown, but their responses to the challenges of...
On a snowy winter day in 1991, Lu Gang, a slightly built Chinese scholar who had recently received his Ph.D. in plasma physics, walked into a seminar room at the University of Iowa’s Van Allen Hall, raised a snub-nose .38-...
In response to:
The Passions of Joseph Needham from the August 14, 2008 issue
To the Editors:
In his illuminating essay on Joseph Needham [ NYR, August 14], Jonathan...
In a large turnout on March 22, 2008, voters in Taiwan elected as president Mr. Ma Ying-jeou of the Nationalist (KMT) Party. Mr. Ma out-polled rival candidate Frank Hsieh, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), by a 2.2...
Written less than two weeks before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this papers assesses progress made by the Chinese authorities to improve human rights in line with their own commitments made in 2001. This report provides a final summary and updates...
China has experienced a sharp rise in the inflow of so-called “hot money,” foreign capital entering the country supposedly seeking short-term profits, especially in 2008. Chinese estimates of the amount of “hot money” in China vary from $500...
It is open season on the Dalai Lama and not just for Beijing, for whom he is “a monk in wolf’s clothing,” or for Rupert Murdoch, who dismissed him as a “very old political monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.” During his trip to London in May,...
This report focuses on the treatment of foreign journalists by the Chinese government. In the buildup to the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the authors contend, the Chinese government has tried to force foreign journalists to avoid sensitive issues. As a...
This report concerns human rights issues surrounding the suppression of Tibetan protesters in Nepal. Following a Chinese governmental crackdown in Tibet in 2008, many Tibetans in Nepal began to protest. Nepali authorities have harshly suppressed...
On March 10, 2008, a series of demonstrations began in Lhasa and other Tibetan regions of China to mark the 49th anniversary of an unsuccessful Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The demonstrations appeared to begin peacefully with...
Sixty pages or so into Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma, the hero, Dai Wei, is troubled by the memory of a harrowing anatomy lecture that he attended as a university student. Taught by “a celebrated cardiovascular specialist,” the class...
In April 1924 Rabindranath Tagore arrived in Shanghai for a lecture tour of China. Soon after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, Tagore had become an international literary celebrity, lecturing to packed audiences from...
This report, written in the aftermath of the widespread Tibetan unrest in Tibet and Tibetan regions of China in the spring of 2008, addresses the Chinese government with immediate demands. In cracking down on unrest, the Chinese government sealed...
From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household saving rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to ¼ of disposable income. The authors use household-level data to explain the postponing of consumption despite rapid income growth. Saving rates...
Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer’s account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled...
China has a determined, yet still modest, program of civilian space activities planned for the next decade. The potential for U.S.-China cooperation in space—an issue of interest to Congress—has become more controversial since the January 2007...
At present the one-sided propaganda of the official Chinese media is having the effect of stirring up inter-ethnic animosity and aggravating an already tense situation. This is extremely detrimental to the long-term goal of safeguarding
