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 …
“When two elephants fight against each other, the grass always suffers,” said Yu-Fang Lin of the National Policy Foundation, a Taiwan-based think tank, in an interview with the Washington Times. He was talking about the famous phone call between Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and Donald Trump on 2 December. If the US and China get …
“If the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a US-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea,” said an editorial in the Global Times last week. The Global Times is an English-language daily paper specialising in international affairs that is published by the People’s Daily, the Chinese …
When news got out that US President Barack Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping had reached an agreement on climate change, the American blogosphere lit up with negative comments. “The problem is, Obama probably means it,” wrote Jazz Shaw of the major conservative political blog Hot Air, “while China is almost certainly just yanking the …
The crowds of protesters in the streets of Hong Kong continue to grow, and they have spread beyond Central (the business district) to Kowloon and Causeway Bay. The police are already using tear gas and pepper spray, and rubber bullets will be next. It’s not exactly Armageddon, but it’s the most serious organized protest that …
It’s not really “China’s Chechnya” yet, but the insurgency in Xinjiang is growing fast. Incidents of anti-Chinese violence are getting bigger and much more frequent. Since March, 176 people have been killed in six separate attacks on Chinese police and government officials, local collaborators and ordinary Chinese residents of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwestern …
“The oppositions in Hong Kong should understand and accept that Hong Kong is not an independent country. They should not think that they have the ability to turn Hong Kong into Ukraine or Thailand,” warned the Global Times, the most aggressively nationalistic of China’s state-run newspapers. Clearly, some important people in the Communist regime are …
If you were running China, and you wanted to distract your own population from economic woes at home by pushing one of your many territorial disputes with your neighbours into open conflict, which one would you choose? Not Japan, even though most Chinese people really dislike and distrust Japan: it’s allied to the United States, …