China’s military shipyards now are surpassing Western European, Japanese, and Korean military shipbuilders in terms of both the types and numbers of ships they can build. If Beijing prioritizes progress, China’s military shipbuilding technical capabilities can likely become as good as Russia’s are now by 2020 and will near current U.S. shipbuilding technical proficiency levels […]
Two historically momentous events will unfold in the next few days. The Americans will decide who will run their country for the next four years, and the Chinese Communist Party will bring in a new leadership that would be responsible for shaping the world’s second-largest economy for the next decade. While there is little similarity […]
It’s a state of lockdown so extreme that it feels like war. With China’s change in leadership at the 18th National Party Congress just nine days away, “stability and security” has become the number-one issue for all levels of Chinese government. Although “stability preservation” (“维稳”) is always a high priority in China, it has now […]
“We want to survive,” read signs carried by the hundreds of protestors who thronged the streets of Ningbo, a southeastern Chinese coastal city, from Friday through Sunday. Their demand: that the local government scrap plans for an $8.9 billion expansion of a petrochemical plant to be operated by a subsidiary of state-run oil giant Sinopec. By Sunday […]
The rest of the world may have forgotten the anniversary, but a neglected border war that took place 50 years ago is now more pertinent than ever. Before dawn on the morning of Oct. 20, 1962, the People’s Liberation Army launched a surprise attack, driving with overwhelming force through the eastern and western sections of […]
Like many of you I am eagerly awaiting the new James Bond film Skyfall, especially Javier Bardem’s star turn as Raoul Silva, the classic Bond villain with his outlandish plot to pay 60% over market price for a Canadian oil company. No, wait, that’s from the business pages, isn’t it? You’ll forgive me: the stories sound […]
Two years after China limited its exports of “rare earth minerals,” unnerving developed countries that depended on them for industrial uses, production is expanding at sites outside China. And as new sources of rare earth minerals have appeared, that has meant new jobs — including in the tiny town of China Grove, N.C., where Japan’s […]
On Thursday Oct 26 The New York Times published a 4,700 word article on corruption among the members of Wen Jiabao’s family, alleging that they amassed a fortune of $2.7 billion through shadowy business dealings. Appearing on the front page of both New York Times’ English and Chinese websites, both sites were completely blocked in China within hours. Prior to the article’s […]
China’s currency hit a 19-year high against the U.S. dollar on Friday. Not coincidentally, on the same day the yuan rose to 6.238 against the greenback, disgraced former Politburo member Bo Xilai suffered his latest indignity, with the official Xinhua News Agency announcing his removal from the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature. “According to the law on […]
On Oct. 8, the House Select Intelligence Committee released a report on the cybersecurity threat posed by China‘s Huawei and ZTE, the world’s second- and fourth-largest telecommunications suppliers. The report, which described the companies as potential espionage risks and asked the U.S. government and U.S. firms to refrain from doing business with them, drew an angry response […]
looking beyond borders 