A graft investigation into former railways minister Liu Zhijun that started in February 2011 has concluded with the ministry issuing a document on August 3 that lists six disciplinary violations Liu committed. The internal ministry notice sheds...
When Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, needed something done in China, he often turned to his company’s “chief Beijing representative,” a mysterious businessman named Yang Saixin. Mr. Yang arranged meetings for Mr. Adelson with senior Chinese...
An unofficial report of proceedings in the Gu Kailai trial has surfaced. I can't vouch for its authenticity, but have done a quick and dirty, and not entirely literal, translation anyway. Comments, corrections, and suggestions welcome.
Ten years after his elevation to General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Jintao remains almost as much of an enigma now as he was on first taking power. What do we know about the man beyond his reputation as a somewhat robotic...
China’s most widely anticipated trial in a generation ended Thursday less than eight...
The murder trial of Gu Kailai, the wife of the deposed political leader ...
Includes articles on Bo Xilai and the PLA, the Pacific PIvot, Economic Uncertaintly Its Effect on Politics, and China's Top Future Leaders to watch.
When Liu Xiang, China’s track and field superstar, crashed to the ground at the London Olympic Games on Tuesday after stumbling over the first hurdle in his 110-meter men’s hurdles heat, an announcer on the state broadcaster openly wept and...
With China’s once-a-decade leadership transition only months away, the party is pushing back with a highly visible campaign against disloyalty and corruption, even requiring all officers to report financial assets.
In the last decade, the world has started taking more notice of Central Asia. For the United States and its allies, the region is a valuable supply hub for the Afghanistan war effort. For Russia, it is an arena in which to exert political...
On July 23rd in Guizhou province, lawyers obtained a partial victory for some of the defendants accused of involvement in organized crime. Not all the accused were as fortunate, and the limited results came with the support of an intense...
When China’s fallen political grand dame, Gu Kailai, steps into a courtroom this week to face a murder charge, one of the few things we can expect with any certainty is the verdict: guilty. Barring a political tornado between now and the...
Most shop owners in a city of roughly 8 million people have pulled down their shutters to avoid what they fear will be stringent enforcement of a city ordinance tied to the hosting of the 2013 National Games.
Small business owners in...
At a recent conference of Chinese political scientists and international relations scholars in Beijing, a western academic remarked that he was struck by how Chinese scholars often seemed keen to use their research to come up with advice for the...
Over the past several years, the most significant overall U.S. foreign policy action of relevance to China has been the announcement and initial follow-through of the so-called Pacific pivot or “Rebalancing” of U.S. attention and resources to the...
Three main themes emerged in Taiwan politics in the wake of President Ma Ying-jeou’s convincing reelection victory in January. First, in a highly contentious election that portended continuing intra-party strife, the DPP chose its new chairman,...
Political uncertainty is inevitable as China prepares for this fall’s leadership transition. This year economic conditions are also unusually unpredictable. In particular, while China is undergoing an inevitable economic slowdown, few have a...
The unexpected flight of Chongqing’s Public Security head to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in February started an unexpected sequence of events that led to the removal of Bo Xilai, the princeling head of the Chongqing party committee, and the...
From a procedural perspective, the removal of Bo Xilai from Chongqing and from the party Politburo resembles the 2006 purge of Shanghai party boss Chen Liangyu and the 1995 takedown of Beijing City party chief Chen Xitong. Bo’s removal in that...
The composition of the new Politburo that will take power in late 2012, including generational attributes and individual idiosyncratic characteristics, group dynamics, and the factional balance of power, will have profound implications for China’...
The Chinese Communist Party has always put great emphasis on smooth surfaces, maintaining political “face” through a decorous exterior. Men at the top dye their hair black and every strand must be in place. But sometimes there are cracks in the...
A visitor to Jingbian county in northern Shaanxi province finds at its heart a thriving oil town in the grip of a state-owned company, Shaanxi Yanchang Petroleum. Yanchang’s building, 12 storeys high, towers over the low-slung town. The company...
The Chinese Communist Party has always put great emphasis on smooth surfaces, maintaining political “face” through a decorous exterior. Men at the top dye their hair black and every strand must be in place. But sometimes there are cracks in the...
The Chinese Communist Party has always put great emphasis on smooth surfaces, maintaining political “face” through a decorous exterior. Men at the top dye their hair black and every strand must be in place. But sometimes there are cracks in the...
Authoritarian regimes have traditionally relied heavily on controlling the flow of information that their subjects receive as a critical element of maintaining political power. The Chinese Communist Party is no different: they have an extensive...
Protests in the eastern Chinese city of Qidong ended with victory for opponents of a government-run pipeline project that they claimed would increase pollution in local waters . But it also appears to have exacerbated anti-Japanese sentiment both...
The decision to cancel the metal refinery project in Shifang last month after protesters clashed with the police has been widely reported in the Chinese and global media. This is not the first time a project has been shelved due to public...
The United States and China have a relatively successful relationship, but their distrust of each other's long-term intentions has reached a potentially dangerous level, says Kenneth Lieberthal, an experienced China expert based in Washington....
As weeks have passed without news of the fates of Bo Xilai, a suspended Politburo member, and his wife, Gu Kailai, a suspect in the murder of a foreigner, some speculated that party leaders were having difficulty...
Amid fears that the mainland is increasing their involvement in Hong Kong politics, the San Francisco Chronicle reports ...
The news that Chinese prosecutors have filed formal murder charges against Gu Kailai, the wife of disgraced former Communist Party boss of Chongqing Bo Xilai, has conjured up tantalizing images of a sensational...
China's statisticians get a tough press. After all, it was Europe, not China, whose fudged public finance data helped usher in the latest round of global financial turmoil. The biggest corporate fraud in recent memory isn't China's Sino-Forest,...
Chinese Olympians were subjected to a state-sponsored doping regime which was modelled on eastern Europe, says a retired Chinese Olympic doctor.
Steroids and human growth hormones were officially treated as part of ''scientific training''...
Many bloggers have already written about the posturing of certain of our elected representatives on the issue of China-made clothing for US Olympic athletes, using various permutations of the word “idiot” (e.g., ...
Taiwan regulators have put strict conditions on a bid by a China-friendly media group to purchase the island’s second largest cable TV system as concerns grow that China’s commercial clout is already undermining freedom of the press in one of...
In the face of mounting criticism from online commentators and state media, Beijing city officials have finally raised the official death toll of the devastating floodwaters that hit the city last weekend from thirty-six to seventy-seven. The...
The hackers clocked in at precisely 9:23 a.m. Brussels time on July 18 last year, and set to their task. In just 14 minutes of quick keyboard work, they scooped up the e-mails of the president of the ...
Beguiled by undersea oil and gas deposits and the weakness of fellow claimants to the Paracel Islands, China launched a naval offensive to seize the disputed archipelago. To justify its actions, Beijing pointed to...
The government of Taiwan, the self-ruling island over which Beijing claims sovereignty, has been inching toward more amicable relations with the mainland in recent years. The full opening of the island’s...
If Horatio Alger had spoken Mandarin he would have loved the...
After years of debate, the Senate is set to take up a cyber-security bill that would force power companies and other vulnerable parts of the infrastructure to meet...
Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced political leader Bo Xilai, has been charged with the...
If this past weekend’s deluge in Beijing shows us anything, it’s that nothing and no one in this city is waterproof.
For a capital city unusual, and perhaps unique, in being situated neither on a coastline nor along the banks of a big river, Beijing has been under water a lot of late. Violent summer rainstorms flooded the city in June of last year, overwhelming...
Daniel A. Bell has a piece today in the CSM, arguing that the PRC political...
Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most famous political prisoner in China, has now served about one-fourth of his 11-year sentence for seeking democratic reforms. The government, at his trial, said Mr. Liu was guilty of “inciting...
The South China Sea dispute between China and some of its South East Asian neighbours - Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei - has reached an impasse. Increasingly assertive positions among claimants have pushed regional tensions to new...
The South China Sea dispute between China and some of its South East Asian neighbours – Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei – has reached an impasse. Increasingly assertive positions among claimants have pushed regional tensions to new...
Ding Guangen, a former chief of propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party, died here in Beijing on Sunday. He was 83. His death was announced by Xinhua, China’s state news agency, which did not specify the cause. Mr. Ding stepped down in 2002...
Clutching a wooden cane and aided by an entourage of young people, the old man in a black silk shirt and matching shorts hobbled up the stairs to Kiessling, a decades-old Austrian restaurant not far from the teeming beaches of ...
A Chinese court on Friday upheld a $2.4 million fine for tax evasion against the country's most famous dissident, Ai Weiwei, after barring him from attending the hearing, in a case that critics accuse Beijing of using to muzzle the outspoken...
Misrepresentations and misunderstandings of “China” is a complicated issue that won’t disappear overnight. The news media you have trusted doesn’t always give you an unbiased perspective, even though they have been trying their best. Even...
In vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria for the third time, China and Russia have...
On Wednesday it emerged that Lu Yan and Sun Jian, the publisher and deputy editor of Shanghai's often-combative Oriental Morning Post, had been removed from their positions. It is unclear exactly what triggered the
...Thousands of people threw water bottles and blocked traffic at a popular nature preserve in northeastern China on Sunday after word spread that the arrival of top Communist Party leaders was causing an hours-long wait to visit a scenic lake. It...
China’s best athletes have not only broken records but they’ve hauled in increasingly sizeable cash bonuses from central and local governments for their champion, medal-winning performances at Olympic events.
Between 1984, when China re-...
A heavyweight crowd gathered last October for a banquet in Beijing’s tallest skyscraper. The son of Mao Zedong’s immediate successor was there, as was the daughter of the country’s No. 2 military official for nearly...
