It looks like being a particularly grim Lunar New Year in the “tigers’ cage” this week. The notorious Qincheng maximum security prison houses many disgraced senior Communist Party officials – including fallen security chief Zhou Yongkang, former Chongqing boss Bo Xilai, ex-presidential aide Ling Jihua and Guo Boxiong, who was once a top general. Read […]
Since the collapse of several authoritarian regimes in the 1980s and 1990s—most notably the Soviet Union—conventional wisdom in political science has held that dictatorships inevitably democratize or stagnate. This wisdom has even been applied to China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has presided over 26 years of economic growth since violently suppressing protests at Tiananmen […]
As China’s power and influence continue to grow in Asia and beyond, many analysts look to Chinese history to understand how a strong China will behave and view the world in the future. Many of these attempts to apply an historical lens engage in gross simplifications and misreadings of the relevance and meaning of hundreds […]
The Chinese leaders see no contradiction between economic and social liberalization on the one hand and more political control on the other. In fact, in their minds, the latter is the condition for the former. Lightening up and tightening up are two sides of the same coin. Read Here – Bloomberg
For siblings of China’s Bo Xilai, the dramatic trial they witnessed in the courtroom over the past week was probably a nightmarish déjà vu. Read Here –
Unlike in democracies, where politicians vying for office first introduce themselves to their constituents, China‘s leaders take a rather different approach. Only after the Chinese Communist Party has chosen its top leader in secret does he begin the process of “introducing” himself to the people. The newly enthroned general secretary Xi Jinping has been busy firing corrupt officials, visiting […]
The new leaders of the Chinese Communist Party may have moved into office, but so far their new policies have not. Yet if these men at the top—led by party General Secretary Xi Jinping—are to resolve a daunting array of problems at home and abroad, they must move quickly to prevent bad situations from growing […]
With his trip to Shenzhen and other places in southern China, Xi Jinping, the new leader of China’s Communist Party, has all but declared himself to be a reformer in the vein of Deng Xiaoping. Chinese politics is always full of signs, symbols, and suggestions. After a year characterized by a confusing mix of “signs […]
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 […]
When the Japanese army invaded China in 1931, Mao Zedong, in those days still a guerrilla fighter, turned and ran. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s nominal president at the time, stayed behind to fight the Japanese in his wartime capital of Chongqing, but Mao’s Communist Party fled to the north to establish a base of anti-Japanese resistance in […]
looking beyond borders 