A 38-nation Pew Research Center survey finds there are reasons for calm as well as concern when it comes to democracy’s future. More than half in each of the nations polled consider representative democracy a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. Yet, in all countries, pro-democracy attitudes coexist, to varying degrees, with […]
China’s new leadership lineup has been revealed. The members of the Politburo Standing Committee are, in order of seniority, President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji and Han Zheng. The unveiling of the new lineup marks the climax of the twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle after months-long intense horse trading and […]
The ruling Communist Party has formally lifted Xi Jinping’s status to China’s most powerful ruler in decades, setting the stage for the authoritarian leader to tighten his grip over the country while pursuing an increasingly muscular foreign policy and military expansion. The move to insert Xi’s name and dogma into the party’s constitution alongside the party’s founders […]
China’s top graft-buster Wang Qishan is not on the list of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and is therefore confirmed to be retiring from the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of the Chinese leadership…The release of the list came after the twice-in-a-decade national congress adopted the political ideology of President Xi Jinping into […]
In the wake of Trump’s election, signs of a grassroots activism in the tech industry have been everywhere: management-endorsed Googleplex protests; tech workers participating in their first political marches; executives from Tesla, Intel, and IBM leaving the president’s advisory councils. There’s also a growing realization that the most effective form of resistance is winning state […]
The era of President Xi Jinping has begun. As he strode to the podium of the Great Hall of the People and delivered his extraordinarily long speech at the opening of the Communist Party’s 19th congress on Wednesday, Xi laid out an ambitious vision not only for his upcoming second term of five years, but more importantly for the next […]
Let’s take another look at his file: just three years ago this young man was totally unknown to the general public. By contrast, he was very well known to a small Parisian milieu in which politics, finance and the media are almost incestuously intertwined. In this milieu – which he looks down on today, as […]
The country with the world’s third-largest military by personnel strength, fifth-largest defense budget, and seventh-largest economy isn’t a member of the UN Security Council. It isn’t even a member of the G-7, the exclusive club of major industrialised economies. It is India, a country long regarded as an emerging power rather than a major global player. Read […]
President Xi Jinping spent 3.5 hours delivering his maiden political report at the 19th Communist Party congress, outlining his vision for the next five years of development in China. Read More: China’s Xi pledges to build ‘modern socialist country’ China’s 19th Party Congress and How the Mighty Xi Jinping Could Fall China to elect new […]
China is quickly growing into the world’s most extensive commercial empire. By way of comparison, after World War II, the Marshall Plan provided the equivalent of $800 billion in reconstruction funds to Europe (if calculated as a percentage of today’s GDP). In the decades after the war the United States was also the world’s largest […]
looking beyond borders 