In the name of safeguarding its 1.4 billion people, China has been collecting biometric information from millions of people whom it deems potential threats—among them, Uyghurs, migrant workers, and college students—as part of national DNA database.
Courtesy: Global Times
In concrete terms, the Belt and Road initiative is an immensely ambitious development campaign through which China wants to boost trade and stimulate economic growth across Asia and beyond. It hopes to do so by building massive amounts of infrastructure connecting it to countries around the globe. By some estimates, China plans to pump $150bn into such projects each year. In a report released at the start of this year, ratings agency Fitch said an extraordinary $900 billion in projects were planned or underway.
Courtesy: Global Times
World leaders are gathering in Beijing this weekend for a big summit touting China’s infrastructure spending spree to connect Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative—or “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) in straight translation—was introduced by president Xi Jinping in 2013 as a land-and-sea version of the fabled Silk Road trading route of the 16th to 18th centuries.
Hahei is an artery that leads to the busy Tianjin port. The port’s vast rail-and-road connected hinterland covers six provinces, including Tibet and Xinjiang, the gateway to central Asia and Europe, as part of the ambitious One Belt One Road (OBOR) connectivity initiative, woven around the ancient Silk Road. In total, Tianjin’s hinterland sweeps across half of China’s area, covering 17% of the country’s population.
China’s General Office Director Li Zhanshu has a low-key yet powerful presence among Chinese President Xi Jinping’s inner circle. He has gradually moved from behind the curtains to the front stage as Xi’s alter ego at critical junctures. With the approaching 19th Party Congress, China analysts have reached a consensus that Li will move up. The only question is, how high?
…Since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, nationalism has grown even stronger, which means “historical nihilism” isn’t likely to go away any time soon. At the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in Beijing in March, lawmakers made the defamation of communist heroes and martyrs a civil offence.
China will gather its friends and allies together for its biggest diplomatic event of the year in May, a summit on its New Silk Road plan, with most Asian leaders due to attend but only one from a G7 nation, the Italian prime minister.
Chinese enterprises are going global, venturing overseas to acquire foreign companies, know-how, and technologies. While most of these activities reflect simple business decisions, others carefully and deliberately advance China’s strategic interests, perhaps against the interests of its trading partners.
Xi is the sixth man to rule the People’s Republic of China, and the first who was born after the revolution, in 1949. He sits atop a pyramid of eighty-seven million members of the Communist Party, an organization larger than the population of Germany. The Party no longer reaches into every corner of Chinese life, as it did in the nineteen-seventies, but Xi nevertheless presides over an economy that, by one measure, recently surpassed the American economy in size; he holds ultimate authority over every general, judge, editor, and state-company C.E.O.
