Slower Chinese GDP growth is not a bad thing if it’s happening for the right reasons. But it’s not happening for the right reasons.
Instead of reining in credit to try to curb over-investment, Chinese authorities have allowed a renewed...
An interview with Zhang Xianmin, founder of one of the many independent cultural events that were banned last year by the Chinese government.
The voraciousness with which Chinese viewers are watching the segment suggests that their appetite for such coverage, for publicly criticizing an ally that has become something of an embarrassment, far exceeds what they’re getting from...
A new, full-searchable document dump containing over 206,000 documents related to Henry Kissinger from between 1973 and 1976.
The current situation, in which North Korea has threatened the US and its ally South Korea with nuclear strikes, is “a golden opportunity for the US and China to work together and build mutual trust.”
To those raised in the Marxist tradition, nothing in the media happens by accident. In China, the flagship newspapers are still the “throat and tongue” of the ruling party, and their work is directed by the Party’s Propaganda Department....
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has appealed to North Korea to change course, saying it has "gone too far." In this video, Martin Patience reports China’s options as Pyongyang’s rhetoric gets more volatile.
Beijing appears to prefer the devil it knows, in the shape of the unpredictable Kim family regime, to the uncertainties, and perhaps American influence, that a reunification on the Korean peninsula could bring, but that seems to be changing...
Mainland China now, like Taiwan in 1987, is riddled with issues where many people want to see change, from education to pollution to corruption. May we see a similar transition occur in China, initiated by a strong individual politician?...
“The military-first regime derives support from the public perception that it is feared and respected around the world. So international ridicule may well put the regime under more pressure to carry through on at least some of its rhetoric...
The Communist party firmly believes that the less the public knows about its leaders, the better, and has spent years carefully deleting information about Mrs Peng and crafting a narrative so exemplary it is, at times, hard to believe....
Until now, Pyongyang had clung to the transparent fiction that it only had a peaceful rationale.The new element in the announcement is North Korea's acknowledgement that the uranium enrichment is for weapons use.
The new provision following recent cyberattacks requires NASA, as well as the U.S. Justice and Commerce Departments, to seek approval from national law enforcement officials before buying information technology systems from China....
“A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel” is the most revealing work on the Bo Xilai episode to date. What emerges is an immensely complicated tale of behind-the-scenes power struggles as full of scandal, ambition and betrayal as anything that...
Mandarin under totalitarianism is brimming with tautologies, self-aggrandizement and gangster logic, it has no use, no mercy, no reason, no fun, and no taste; it is reduced to a language game that has no connection with reality. ...
For much of the past century, U.S. relations with Tibet have been characterized by kowtowing to the Chinese and hollow good wishes for the Dalai Lama. As early as 1908, William Rockhill, a U.S. diplomat, advised the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that “...
After receiving his delayed wages, thirty-year-old Wang Jie decided to change professions.
On March 7, he pressed a fingerprint onto a receipt that read: “Today I have received settlement of the 12,000 yuan in wages owed to me by Mr. Shao...
The world’s second and third largest economies are engaged in a standoff over the sovereignty of five islets and three rocks in the East China Sea, known as the Diaoyu in Chinese and the Senkaku in Japanese. Tensions erupted in September 2012...
Journalist Liu Jianfeng worked at the China Economic Times newspaper in Beijing for fifteen years. Eventually, frustration with the nation’s state-controlled media system and pressure...
The first months of 2013 have seen a rapid intensification of combative rhetoric and action from North Korea. In the sixteen months since Kim Jong-un assumed leadership of the country, North Korea has run through the whole litany of provocations...
While foreign media coverage these last two weeks has focused on environmental disasters, over-fishing, and emerging forms of the avian flu, the Chinese state media has turned its gaze towards the transgressions of Apple Computer, which found...
Warning that graft and gluttony threaten to bring down the ruling Communists, Mr. Xi has ordered an end to boozy, taxpayer-financed banquets and the bribery that often takes the form of Louis Vuitton bags.
Ideally, Beijing would like to maintain a low profile while showing respect to other countries. China has no ambition to dominate BRICS, and will not purposely seek to raise its role in this mechanism.
Chinese trade with African countries was nearly $200 billion in 2012. But after years of embracing China, some Africans say that China is taking more than it gives back and replicating colonial patterns.
In dedicating his people to pursue something more abstract and individualized, Xi has succeeded in capturing their attention. Now he faces the challenge of meeting their expectations.
For the past decade, the U.S. has been nonchalant and complacent about China’s “invasion” and lightning-fast penetration of Africa, but the U.S. is finally reading the memo.
During the turbulent Maoist era from the 1950s to 1970s, China clashed militarily with some of its most important neighbors—India, Vietnam, the Soviet Union—and embarked on disastrous interventions in Indonesia and Africa. But by the 1980s, Deng...
David Wertime:
A new strain of avian flu called H7N9 has infected at least seven humans and killed three in provinces near the Chinese metropolis of...
Xi Jinping, the newly appointed Chinese President, unfolded his presidency with a grand foreign tour to Russia, Tanzania, South Africa, and the Republic of the Congo. While this series of state visits unequivocally underscored China’s diplomatic...
Xi Jinping’s trip to Moscow earlier this week, his first journey abroad as China’s new Head of State, has raised interesting questions about China’s ambitions in Asia, and coupled with Washington’s “pivot to Asia” is resurrecting the specter of a...
Most global citizens are well aware of the explosive growth of the Chinese economy. Indeed, China has famously become the “workshop of the world.” Yet, while China watchers have shed much light on the country’s internal dynamics—China’s politics, its vast social changes, and its economic development—few have focused on how this increasingly powerful nation has become more active and assertive throughout the world.
Although not universal, there is some concern among Africans that China may be a “new colonial power,” extracting resources and selling manufactured goods.
President Xi Jinping, accompanied by his wife Peng Liyuan, is on his March2013 inaugural overseas trip. The trip started in Russia last week, and is now passing through Africa with stops in Tanzania, the Republic of Congo and South Africa...
Professor Deborah Brautigam talks about how she became interested in China-Africa relations, the recent influx of scholarship on China-Africa relations, media reporting on China-Africa issues and how to do quality research....
“There's a sense from Africans that it’s not an equal relationship. That China is extracting oil and then in return building infrastructure projects with its own companies and own workers and not necessarily transferring the skills to...
On the first stop on an African tour that will include a B.R.I.C.S. summit of major emerging economies, Xi Jinping told Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete that China’s involvement in Africa would help the continent grow richer....
At a time when China’s Foreign Ministry is struggling to improve China’s international image, Peng Liyuan, 50, who has dazzled audiences at home and abroad with her bravura soprano voice, comes as a welcome gift.
Xi Jinping’s first foreign visits since his inauguration and new appointments in foreign policy-related positions hint at the direction of the new administration’s foreign policy plans and goals.
As some officials push for tighter restrictions on pollutants, SOEs have been putting profits ahead of health in working to outflank new rules, according to government data and interviews with people involved in policy negotiations....
Written into the script for China’s once-in-a-decade leadership shuffle, confirmed at the recently concluded National People’s Congress, are macroeconomic policies for the new government that plot a course for future growth.
The policy...
After months of speculation, the reorganization of the State Council has finally been approved by the National People’s Congress.
Under the shake-up, China’s rail business will no longer be managed by the regulator. Three national agencies...
Pressures and Distortions looks at the design, building, and interpretation of cities from the point of view of their residents.The cities chronicled in depth include examples from China (Shanghai and Shenzhen), Latin America (Bogotá and Mexico City), and Indonesia (Banda Aceh). Shorter sections cover Lima and Rio de Janeiro. The authors show how residents respond creatively to environmental disaster, poverty, housing shortages, and surging urban population. They also show how governments, international relief agencies, architects, and planners can shape better urban environments.
In his eight years as China’s environmental protection minister, Zhou Shengxian has failed to keep almost a single promise. I say “almost”: he has kept his word at least when it comes to his own career—as promised, he has not quit.
When...
Speculation surrounds Xi’s upcoming trip to Russia this Friday March 22, 2013, with many expecting Xi to start exerting China's economic power in diplomacy and taking a more offensive diplomatic stance in general.
The striking disparity in the relationship is that Chinese enterprises and construction operations in Africa employ many fewer Africans in unskilled laboring positions than they obviously could.
Recently appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary discussed exchange rate, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and North Korea in his first meeting with Xi Jinping and the rest of the newly appointed Chinese leadership.
A country’s foreign policy should be judged on the basis of its actions as well as its rhetoric. When we conduct a careful examination of Chinese policies and actions, we see that Chinese foreign policy is actually ambivalent, even weak....
Before getting pregnant with her second child, Lu Qingmin went to the family-planning office to apply for a birth permit. Officials in her husband’s Hunan village where she was living turned her down, but she had the baby anyway. She may...
In his first press conference after taking office as China's new premier...
Although China's annual foreign movie quota was recently increased, there’s much uncertainty surrounding how Xi’s rise to power will impact the entertainment industry.
China’s new prime minister, Li Keqiang, entered the job on Friday inheriting a wobbling economy that could distract his government from its bold vows to clean up pollution and harness expanding towns and cities as an engine for...
