china

Chinese Human Rights Dissident Loses `Subversion’ Appeal

China’s leading dissident, Liu Xiaobo, yesterday lost his appeal against his conviction and 11-year sentence for inciting subversion.
Outside the court, US and European diplomats called for the immediate release of the 54-year-old Liu, a writer and one-time professor who was first detained in December 2008 after co-authoring a manifesto calling for political reform in China.
US [...]

Trial Begins in Chinese Corruption Crackdown

Corruption runs rampant in China. Though millions of Chinese citizens have little to no access to the internet, government dealings with the various forms of mafia go without saying. It is in this climate that the beginning of perhaps the most intriguing chapter in China’s most sweeping crackdown on corruption in recent history takes place. [...]

China Growth Model Poses a Big Problem

This is quite an interesting little comment buried down in a Financial Times article today, about how the Chinese authorities are raising a lot of international concerns (including inside Brazil, the other titan of the BRIC grouping) by artificially keeping their currency undervalued and failing to allow for the development of what could become one [...]

The Language of Human Rights

This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal.
Human rights are under attack, and language is the weapon. The very grammar of justice has fallen into the wrong hands, instrumentalized in the elaborate and sensational theaters of due process. A trial without any rights of defense is still called a “trial,” a conviction ordered [...]

Google ‘Not Feeling Lucky’ in China

Google’s dramatic threat to close its business in China unless the authorities allow it to provide uncensored search results throws into stark relief the limits to globalization.
The dream of  google spearheading the initiative to unify the World Wide Web by flattening the Earth into a single cyberspace has been shattered by that governments’ determination to control [...]

Chinese Foreign Minister Hon. Yang Jiechi on China and Africa

Chinese Foreign Minister Hon. Yang Jiechi recently sat down with both China Radio International and Kenya Broadcasting Corporation at the Chinese embassy in Nairobi. One of the lesser-discussed initiatives China has undertaken to wear the king’s crown in the realm of geopolitical hegemony was and is their continued strides in Africa. Below, the Foreign Minister [...]

China and Human Rights – Liu Xiaobo Trial Tomorrow

The trial of the internationally renowned dissident Liu Xiaobo is set to start tomorrow in Bejing. Although he was promised an open trial, European and U.S. diplomats have been refused access to the hearing. Chinese reform activists and his wife say they have been warned not to attend the trial.
Chinese court officials called Liu’s attorneys last weekend [...]

Changing China From Terminal 1

Since November 4, Feng Zhenghu has been an unusual fixture at the bustling Narita International Airport outside Tokyo. Feng is a Chinese citizen with a valid Japanese visa. He refuses to pass through immigration checkpoints to enter Japan for a simple reason — he wants to go home.
But the Chinese government has blocked his path [...]

The Great (Stone) Wall

“Be wary of China, for when she wakes, she will shake the world”. – Napoleon Bonaparte
The United States have long exerted themselves moral leaders in the geopolitical community. Their bilateral relations with China however, especially given the new economic playing field in the wake of the international economic recession, has left U.S. President Barack Obama’s [...]

Why Africa Welcomes the Chinese

An interesting geopolitical scenario takes place daily, sometimes eerily unbeknownst to many. More attention must be given from the west regarding Chinese investment in African infrastructure and its ramifications in the long-run at home. Paul Kagame has written a concise and thoroughly educational piece on the merits of Chinese versus western involvement with Africa.
As excerpted from [...]