President Donald Trump and his team are talking up the opportunity to finally achieve stricter border security, wider tax cuts and reduced reliance on Chinese manufacturing amid the spread of the coronavirus throughout the U.S. Some officials see it as a narrow opening to offset the political damage from the coronavirus outbreak and deliver — […]
In the post-Mao era, the Chinese people and Communist Party leaders have adhered to an implicit social contract: the people tolerate the party’s political monopoly, as long as the party delivers economic progress and adequate governance. The party’s poor handling of the COVID-19 outbreak has threatened this tacit pact. Read Here – Project Syndicate
Throughout history, diseases have posed an unsparing test of political leaders and their fidelity to the facts. According to Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, “From the political to the purely mercenary, secrecy has almost always contributed to the further spread of a pandemic and hindered public health management.” Read Here – The […]
The global coronavirus outbreak might accomplish something that myriad bad polls haven’t: make Republicans fear losing the 2020 presidential election. Until now, survey after survey has consistently shown President Trump losing to the Democrats in November. Like, to all of the Democrats. Yet Republicans have remained confident…But the plunging stock market, badly spooked by the unpredictable […]
Since the Wuhan lockdown began, there have been tensions between local government and the central organs of the state. There is a phrase in China for the way such tensions are manifested: when everyone denies all responsibility and tries to shift the blame back onto the blamer, they are busy ‘throwing woks’. Read Here – […]
President Xi Jinping had warned his Chinese Communist Party cadres in late January 2019 to be prepared for unforeseen incidents (black swans) and highly probable but uncontrollable rampages (gray rhinos) in the year to come. Initially, the U.S.-China trade war and Hong Kong demonstrations were thought to be the big events of this “9” year. […]
The COVID-19 outbreak has hit at a time of much greater economic vulnerability than in 2003, during the SARS outbreak, and China’s share of world output has more than doubled since then. With other major economies already struggling, the risk of outright global recession in the first half of 2020 seems like a distinct possibility. […]
Although the global coronavirus epidemic has only recently made international headlines, some in China have known about it since the beginning of December. Thanks to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s high-tech dictatorship, that information was not made public, and the virus was allowed to take off. Read Here – Project Syndicate
The coronavirus outbreak that exploded three weeks ago in the central Chinese city of Wuhan has prompted the most severe government actions in three decades. Cities are closed down, transport links broken, and tens of millions of people effectively quarantined. At a time when the Party and the leadership claim supremacy over every aspect of […]
Compared to other political challenges that have drawn large amounts of international criticism over the past two years, ranging from the 2018 Constitutional Amendments to the Xinjiang and Hong Kong crises, the current situation constitutes a much more serious threat to the Party-state’s domestic legitimacy. Read Here – China File
looking beyond borders 