ISRAEL‘S prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, suffered not one but two vicarious electoral defeats on Tuesday. Twice this week he has had to swallow hard and congratulate candidates he hoped would lose. The winners were equally cordial to him on the phone. If they enjoyed his discomfiture, they concealed it well. Politics is about interests, not […]
In the United States, the world’s largest economy, President Obama has secured a second term as leader of the country. In China, the second largest economy, by this time next week new leaders will likely have been confirmed as well. In both cases, the new leaders will officially begin their terms in 2013, even if Obama has […]
The Arab Spring that swept away dictatorships across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 unnerved many in the Chinese leadership. Liu Yuan, one of the boldest and most ambitious generals in China’s People’s Liberation Army, was particularly shaken by what he identified as a fatal weakness of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi: his son. Until […]
LET him savour, for a day or two, a victory that many had said could not happen. No president since FDR had been re-elected with unemployment so high. The country seemed pessimistic and bitterly divided, on racial grounds even more than on economic ones. His best-known achievement, health-care reform, had turned out to be deeply […]
For the first time since 1992, the United States’ and China’s political calendars are syncing up, with presidential elections in the former and a leadership transition in the latter. But unlike in the United States, where Mitt Romney would have had to defeat President Barack Obama in a national election to win the White House, Xi […]
It was the talk of teaching Hindi to schoolchildren down under that grabbed all the headlines in India, but Canberra’s White Paper Australia in the Asian Century merits wider attention because governments today rarely state far-reaching plans of any kind, let alone those involving an epochal reorientation of political sensibility. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who commissioned the […]
With Barack Obama successfully defending his presidency in the U.S. election and a new leadership of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) soon to be elected, it is the right time for the Obama Administration to rethink its policy on China, Xinhua says in a commentary. Read Here – Xinhua
Chinese leader Hu Jintao delivered a report on Thursday at the opening of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The following are key quotes from his report: On Scientific Outlook on Development — The most important achievement in our endeavors in the past ten years is that we have formed […]
Now that the U.S. election finally is over, it’s time to focus on the other most important leadership transition in the world: China’s. Like the United States, China is also at a turning point, and though the specifics differ, the crux of the problem is the same: major structural change is critical to sustained future […]
Hu Jintao on Thursday said the Communist Party of China (CPC) must make unremitting efforts to combat corruption, promote integrity and stay vigilant against degeneration. Hu said combating corruption and promoting political integrity, which is a major political issue of great concern to the people, is a clear-cut and long-term political commitment of the Party. […]
looking beyond borders 