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: Dissidents
Putin’s shrinking circle shows return to Soviet politics
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has made no secret of his ambition to restore his country to what he sees as its rightful place among the world’s leading nations…. 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 »
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 »
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 »
Nicaragua: ‘no one left to vote for’
The democratic transition that we Nicaraguans began in 1990, and the peacebuilding we undertook after a tragic war between brothers, relied on an essential foundation: honest and transparent elections, notes… 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 »
China’s sham show trials ‘like a theater of the absurd’
Human rights groups and observers say China’s latest wave of “sham trials” against legal advocates, arrested amid an orchestrated crackdown last July, is mostly a political charade, and to some… Read more »
China: TV Trials ‘Signal New Phase in Attack on Rights’
Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the… Read more »
Zhou Shifeng sentence highlights China’s crackdown on dissent
A court in China jailed a prominent human rights lawyer for seven years on Thursday for subverting the government, state media said, the latest in a string of convictions… Read more »