This new era marks the resurrection of Mao’s one-man rule and symbolises the death of Deng’s two most important political legacies: the consensus-building “collective leadership” and an orderly power succession mechanism… Also, with no clear successor, Xi is set to dominate decision-making for years to come, putting 1.4 billion people, the world’s second-largest economy and an emerging nuclear-armed […]
China’s spectacular military parade on Thursday – the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Japan in World War II – marks the coming of age of the modern Peoples Liberation Army. This was underscored by the announcement President Xi Jinping made that China would cut some 300,000 personnel from its 2.3 million […]
The idea of the “China model,” which gained currency in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, reflects a growing indifference among Chinese elites to Western political systems and economic liberalization, and their renewed interest in a “Chinese path” to development, underpinned by State intervention. This mix of populist nationalism and statist authoritarianism continues to […]
In 1934, an estimated 86,000 soldiers in the Communist Red Army decamped from their Soviet-style base in Jiangxi province in an attempt to escape from Chiang Kai-shek and his encircling Nationalist Army. The desperate retreat, which Mao Zedong later ingeniously labeled the “Long March,” lasted four trying seasons and crossed 11 provinces. Read Here – […]
Lying in a Beijing military hospital in 1990, General Wang Zhen told a visitor he felt betrayed. Decades after he risked his life fighting for an egalitarian utopia, the ideals he held as one of Communist China’s founding fathers were being undermined by the capitalist ways of his children — business leaders in finance, aviation […]
Horrible history can make for poor diplomatic and political tiesdoesn’t always make for bad business. India and China are as good an example of this adage, as China and Japan are too. Henry Kissinger’s book On China begins with a fascinating snippet of what is being discussed fiercely in India these days – a border war 50 years […]
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 […]
looking beyond borders 