In Quebec the English-speaking minority used to call them ‘tongue-troopers’: the government functionaries who come around to check that the French on signs in shops is in a typeface twice as big as the English. Now China will have tongue-troopers too, although the regime has no fear that Chinese might be replaced by Zhuang, Kazakh […]
Russia has its endless war in Ukraine, Africa has the Sudanese civil war, the United States is on the brink of invading Venezuela, India and Pakistan had a brief (non-nuclear) war in South Asia, and Israel bombed Iran, Qatar, Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Well done, everybody! No, wait a minute – where’s East
There is no ‘New World Order’, although there is certainly a new world disorder. The ‘rules-based international order’ that was created after the Second World War, mainly under American leadership, had been fading away anyway as the West’s long economic dominance declined. The arrival of Donald Trump delivered the coup de grace, but nothing has
Long Live the Dalai Lama! By Gwynne Dyer The whole business of succession would be a lot simpler if the Dalai Lama could just regenerate, like Doctor Who. When the time comes for The Doctor to stop looking like David Tennant and start looking like Matt Smith, there’s flame coming out of his head and
10 January 2024 Schrödinger’s Island: Taiwan Election 2024 By Gwynne Dyer Taiwan’s fate is as unknowable as usual, even though we know who the next president will be. William Lai, vice-president under outgoing President Tsai Ing-Wen, will almost certainly win the election on Saturday, because the two opposition parties failed to agree on a joint
12 April 2023 Taiwan: Ignore China’s Conniptions By Gwynne Dyer China has been having conniptions again. President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan had a courtesy meeting last week with the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. Beijing reacted by issuing a “stern warning” to the United States, and then “encircled” the island (its
3 August 2022 Taiwan: Nancy Pelosi’s Last Hurrah By Gwynne Dyer Nancy Pelosi’s brief visit to Taiwan this week caused great if somewhat confected anger in Beijing, but the Chinese Communist regime was not her main target. The Speaker of the House of Representatives has long supported Taiwan, and she will be aware that both
29 December 2021 China: No More Mr. Nice Guy By Gwynne Dyer More than 200 Hong Kong police raided and shut down one of the last pro-democracy news websites in Hong Kong on Wednesday, in the latest sign that the Beijing regime will no longer tolerate dissent of any kind. It was total overkill –
10 October 2021 Will China Invade Taiwan? By Gwynne Dyer China’s President Xi Jinping promised on Saturday that “The historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland… will definitely be fulfilled.” That was a threat to Taiwan, but a threat without a deadline. However Chinese state media, in the form of the ever-rabid ‘Global
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