25 January 2021 Most news agencies reported on Sunday that China sent large groups of fighters and bombers into the Taiwanese airspace two days in a row. Much fluttering in the dovecote: the Chinese are testing the resolve of newly installed US President Joe Biden. Considerably fewer agencies also reported that an American aircraft carrier …
15 November 2020 One Hong Kong lawmaker, Claudia Mo, said it was “the death-knell of Hong Kong’s democracy fight.” But she was part of it: one of the fifteen remaining pro-democracy members of the Legislative Council (Legco) who resigned on Thursday in protest at the expulsion of four other democratically elected members of the pseudo-parliament. …
Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the saying goes, but China does it differently. It brings clubs. Last Monday, China and India had the nastiest frontier incident since their border war of 1962. In the Galwan Valley of the Aksai Chin, a disputed region the size of Switzerland in the western Himalayas, Chinese and …
“We are the meat on the chopping board,” said Martin Lee, founder of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party. “They have set a precedent for Beijing to legislate on Hong Kong’s behalf.” Or as Dennis Kwok put it, former member of the Legislative Council, put it rather more succinctly: “This is the end of Hong Kong.” It’s …
“Over the past few years, China’s diplomatic offensives, military coercion, interference and infiltration have continued unabated,” said Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen on New Year’s Day, as the January 11th election neared. “China’s objective is clear: to force Taiwan to compromise our sovereignty.” But every leader of her Democratic People’s Party (DPP) has always said that. …
After the 17th consecutive weekend of increasingly violent protests in Hong Kong, the first protester was wounded by a live bullet on Tuesday. 18-year-old student Tsang Chi-kin, one of a group of about a dozen students attacking a policeman who had become separated from his comrades, was shot in the chest as he struck the …
The anti-government demonstrations in Hong Kong are now eight weeks old and still going strong, but the level of violence is rising. A lot of the violence is down to the police and to triad gangs who were hired to attack the demonstrators, of course, but now the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the …
Another of the five-yearly anniversaries has rolled around, and it’s time to write another think-piece about the long-term meaning of the massacre on Beijing’s Tienanmen Square on 4 June 1989. But 30 years later, what is there left to say? Great changes were already underway in the Communist-ruled parts of Europe in 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev, …
3 January 2019 “Independence for Taiwan would only bring profound disaster to Taiwan,” said China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Wednesday, and he ought to know. He is the one who would make sure the disaster happened. Speaking on the 40th anniversary of US diplomatic recognition of the Chinese People’s Republic, Xi said that …
The United States could probably extract major concessions from China in a carefully managed confrontation on trading issues, because the Chinese don’t want a trade war with their best export customer. But the US can’t win the trade war that Donald Trump is planning to wage, and it kicks off on Friday. That’s when the …