China to Strengthen Communist Party’s Role in NGOs
China has issued new rules demanding the establishment of Communist Party panels in non-government bodies, aiming to beef up the ruling party’s role in such social groups, amid a broad… Read more »
Category: Dictatorships
HK’s Umbrella Movement Fights Back
The run-up to the Sept. 4 election for Legislative Council is getting tense, and the governments of both Hong Kong and Beijing are watching with keen interest, notes analyst Lian… Read more »
Revitalizing Democracy Support in Troubled Times
The world has experienced a decade of decline in democracy, and the downward trajectory is accelerating, Freedom House reports: Nativist sentiments in the United States and Europe are weakening support… Read more »
Protests Mark a Change in Ethiopia’s Political Landscape
Is Ethiopia about to crack? The New York Times asks: For the last decade, it has been one of Africa’s most stable nations, a solid Western ally with a fast-growing… Read more »
China’s Future a Dictator’s Dilemma: Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival
China’s Communist authorities fretting about potentially “subversive” civil society groups — such as rights lawyers and labor activists — have a new red flag: the upcoming birthday of former president… Read more »
Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible: Lessons from the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible. This was moral revolution, a revolution of conscience rooted in cultural reclamation, and it resonated through the region because it was entirely congruent with… Read more »
Vietnam’s growing protest culture explained
The Formosa scandal in Vietnam has recently made international headlines and offered the international community a rare glimpse into the fringe, but steadily growing, culture of protest and activism in… Read more »
Democracy in China: It’s in the eye of the beholder?
China watchers in the West have been fruitlessly searching for signs of democracy for more than 25 years, notes Bruce J. Dickson, professor of political science at George Washington University. But… Read more »
China’s crackdown on dissent the harshest in decades
China is in the midst of what many overseas scholars say is its harshest crackdown on human rights and civil society in decades, marked by officially-sponsored paranoia about foreign forces… Read more »
Leading Cuban Dissident’s ‘Moments of Optimism’ About Political Change
“We are suffering more arrests. They [state security forces] are beating us hard,” dissident Antonio Rodiles tells The Guardian’s Naomi Larson: It seems he has become desensitised to this violence…. Read more »