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 […]
For millennia, China and Japan have been locked in a relationship even more mutually dependent, competitive and influential than the much more recent one between Washington and Beijing. Each has sought to dominate, or at least be the most influential in, Asia, and the relations of each with their neighbours has at various points been […]
China’s highest-ranking Communist Party members will gather in Beijing beginning October 18 for the Nineteenth Party Congress. The meeting takes place five years since Xi Jinping took the helm of China’s leadership and comes amid a rigorous crackdown on party corruption. While preparations for the congress have been shrouded in secrecy, the event will be […]
The 19th Party Congress will select about 200 people to run China for the next five years, from army generals to executives from China’s biggest state-run conglomerates. A week of pageantry culminates when President Xi Jinping and the handful of other leaders on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee walk onto a red-carpeted stage to present themselves to […]
Chinese leader Xi Jinping inherited two lofty economic targets and a difficult juggling act when he became Communist Party general secretary five years ago. He is on track to achieve the first of the party’s “two centennial goals” in his second term, beginning this month, but has a mixed record on promised economic reforms. Read Here […]
While everyone is talking about face recognition on new phones, China is already developing some surprising applications for this technology such as smiling to pay for your meal, using your face and your voice to access your residence hall at university, enforcing social norms by, for example, naming and shaming jaywalkers, and catching criminals on their day off. Read Here […]
