Edelmina Flores thanks God and Hugo Chávez for her apartment in a new housing complex in the Venezuelan president’s home state of Barinas. She might also want to thank the Chinese government. Since 2007, the China Development Bank has lent Venezuela $42.5 billion, backed by revenue from Venezuelan crude. That sum accounts for nearly a quarter […]
No one in the 20th century was responsible for more deaths than Mao Zedong (1893-1976), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party; not Lenin, Stalin or even Hitler. The sheer size of China meant that Mao’s vicious, carefully premeditated policies led to more death, starvation, suffering and bloodshed than the work of anyone else in history’s […]
Perhaps the most intensely debated issue on the outcome of the clichéd once-in-a-decade transition in China that has drawn the attention of the strategic community is the PLA-Party relationship and its influence on the possible outcome of the transition process. The reason for this is not hard to guess – recent reports emerging out of […]
Until recently, Beijing’s policy in Afghanistan could be characterized as masterful inactivity: It sat on the sidelines of a war that it wanted neither side to win. But the late September visit by security chief Zhou Yongkang, the first by a senior Chinese leader in almost five decades, is the most visible sign that the U.S. 2014 […]
When Xiaobo Zhang got married in the early 1990s, he and his bride, like millions of other couples across China, were given a small room to live in by his danwei, or work unit. At the time a lecturer at Nankai University in Tianjin, Zhang’s room was utilitarian and unremarkable, virtually indistinguishable from the ones inhabited […]
As nationalist war-mongering goes, the anti-Japanese demonstrations taking place across China have been relatively tame. Chinese authorities have maintained tight control over the protesters, some of whom call for an armed response against Japan over disputed islands in the East China Sea: Plastic bottle-throwing is allowed, glass bottle-throwing discouraged. For all the jingoistic talk, the […]
Is civil society taking roots in China? Read Here – China Media Project
Thirty years ago, a young government official with a plum job in Beijing made an odd request: reassignment to a poor rural area. At the time, millions of young people were still clawing their way back to China’s urban centers after being exiled to the countryside in the Mao era. But 30-year-old Xi Jinpingbucked the trend, […]
China’s foreign exchange (‘forex’) reserves and its holdings of U.S. government debt are two of the most frequently misunderstood issues in relations between the two countries. Recent events have underscored this problem. On September 18th, a car carrying Gary Locke, the U.S. Ambassador to China, was surrounded and partially attacked in a sideshow to an […]
China‘s leaders put on a show of unity on Saturday after their damning accusations against disgraced politician Bo Xilai, whose expulsion from the Communist Party drew an outcry from leftist supporters in a sign of the rifts his prosecution could inflame. On Saturday evening, top leaders gathered in the cavernous national parliament building for a […]
