This time it’s the New York Times that has Chinese Internet censors raising the digital gates. Shortly after the publication of a lengthy article Nov. 26 asserting that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s family members “have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion,” the media company’s English and Chinese websites were blocked within China. Then came the official […]
The mother of China’s prime minister was a schoolteacher in northern China. His father was ordered to tend pigs in one of Mao’s political campaigns. And during childhood, “my family was extremely poor,” the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a speech last year. But now 90, the prime minister’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, not only left poverty […]
JUST after the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which starts in Beijing on November 8th, a short line of dark-suited men, and perhaps one woman, will step onto a red carpet in a room in the Great Hall of the People and meet the world’s press. At their head will be Xi […]
Since the 1950s, China has effectively used the doctrine of non-interference to guide its foreign policy agenda in the developing world. In its recent economic and diplomatic engagements in Africa, the policy has come under intense scrutiny and censure as Beijing attempts to strategically navigate the contours of resource acquisition alongside south-south solidarity with its […]
If every modern president needs a creation myth, then Xi Jinping‘s begins on the dusty loess plateau of northwest China. It was here that Xi spent seven formative years, working among the peasants and living in a lice-infested cave dug into the silty clay that extends around the Yellow River. Gradually, the selfless peasants and the unforgiving […]
China’s top leaders have asked policy think-tanks to draw up their most ambitious economic reform proposals in decades that could curb the power of state firms and give more freedom to the setting of interest rates and the yuan currency. But after almost 10 years of delay to painful structural reforms by the outgoing leadership, […]
As the Communist Party of China prepares for a once-in-a-decade change of leadership at the 18th Party Congress in November, the country’s foreign relations are in worse shape than they were 10 years ago, especially in East Asia but also in terms of heightened strategic rivalry with the United States. How the incoming leadership chooses […]
As China’s ruling Communist Party prepares for a once-in-a-decade leadership transition next month, it is planning a daunting step – breaking up the monopolies enjoyed by its gargantuan state-owned enterprises. The monopolists have other ideas. One of the most powerful of all Chinese state-owned giants is the power-grid operator, State Grid Corp, led by the politically […]
The recent crackdown by the Ghanaian government on illegal gold mining put the livelihood of hundreds of Chinese workers in the country at stake. On October 11, when Ghana’s police and immigration bureau raided mining fields in Ashanti province, a security officer shot and killed a 16-year old Chinese worker. More than one hundred Chinese […]
Just 40 years ago, as my family and I were completing a very pleasant and productive academic year in Japan, we had our first opportunity to visit China. We had been waiting to do so for more than a decade. For me, the highlight of the visit was a four-hour dinner conversation with Prime Minister […]
looking beyond borders 