China’s ‘bad emperor’ returns
The weakness of China’s traditional authoritarian political system has for centuries been called the “bad emperor” problem, notes Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University and director of… Read more »
Category: China
China’s new totalitarianism: why Xi’s ‘Return to Personalistic Rule’ shocked the West
One Sunday last month, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, traveled to a village in the mountains of Sichuan Province. He wore an olive overcoat with a fur collar, which he kept… Read more »
The arrival of post-Putin Russia
Russia’s March 2018 election will mark the arrival of the post-Putin era in Russian domestic politics, according to Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, and Gleb Pavlovsky,… Read more »
Beijing blasts Western critics who ‘smear’ China with ‘sharp power’
Beijing issued a harsh rebuke of Western critics who accuse China of using soft power as a vehicle to infiltrate other countries, as it kicked off its biggest political event… Read more »
How the West got China wrong
Last weekend China stepped from autocracy into dictatorship. That was when Xi Jinping, already the world’s most powerful man, let it be known that he will change China’s constitution so… Read more »
Is Vietnam going the way of China?
Activist Pham Doan Trang (above) said she was held for questioning by security officials for several hours on Saturday over her most recent book Politics for the Masses, which is outlawed… Read more »
Xi sets China on ‘collision course with history’ or new model for authoritarianism?
China’s relentless rise and its more recent embrace of repressive tactics that recall the Mao era — a process accelerated by President Xi Jinping’s bid to stay in power indefinitely — have… Read more »
‘Leader of unfree world’ – China’s Xi is ‘courting political catastrophe’
In ending presidential term limits, China’s president Xi Jinping – the leader of the unfree world – is ‘thinking global and acting local’, The South China Morning Post’s Nectar Gan… Read more »
Time to start shredding Putin Playbook
Social media platforms are failing to make the changes that would help curb online disinformation and fake news despite the efforts made since the 2016 US presidential election exposed the… Read more »
China’s ‘Big Data’ fuels crackdown in Xinjiang
Chinese authorities are building and deploying a predictive policing program based on big data analysis in Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said today: The program aggregates data about people – often… Read more »