20 March 2022 Ukraine: Lessons for Taiwan, Lessons for China By Gwynne Dyer Almost a month in, China is still being extremely coy about its attitude towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The regime is acutely aware that there are many parallels between the Russian-Ukrainian relationship and the Chinese-Taiwanese one, and that the Russian attempt …
24 January 2022 Shrinking Asia By Gwynne Dyer In the politics of population, the magic number is 2.1. That is ‘replacement level’: if a country’s fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime) is 2.1, then the country’s population will remain level. Above that number, it starts to grow; below …
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 – …
14 November 2021 COP26: Sharma’s Tears By Gwynne Dyer Closing the two-week COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on Saturday, Alok Sharma, the British president of the 197-country conference, declared “We’ve kept 1.5 (degrees Celsius) within reach, but its pulse is weak.” But he was close to tears several times in his closing remarks. That was …
9 November 2021 COP26: A Mixed Bag By Gwynne Dyer It’s not too early to assess the success or failure of COP26, the climate summit that began in Glasgow on 31 October. The first week, while the heads of state are there, is when all the big promises are announced; the second week is devoted …
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 …
6 September 2021 Too Big To Be Equal? By Gwynne Dyer Never mind the destruction of the relatively free society of Hong Kong (no emergency airlift like Kabul, but the number of people fleeing Hong Kong may ultimately be larger). Never mind the persecution of the Uyghurs, or the Orwellian surveillance society that the Communist …
21 July 2021 ‘Zeitgeist’ is a slippery word. At best it’s just a fancy German way of saying ‘the spirit of the times’; at worst it is only pretentious noise. So maybe we should say ‘inflection point’ instead. I think we are passing through an inflection point. People who have taken climate change seriously for …
16 June 2021 At the recent G7 summit, US president Joe Biden promised to distribute 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines free to the poorer countries by the middle of next year. That’s more than a drop in the bucket, but not much more. A tablespoon in the bucket, perhaps. And the other six ‘Gs’ …
Vaccines for the World: Charity or Self-Interest? Read More »
14 June 2021 “Lifting Trump’s sanctions, @SecBlinken, is a legal& moral obligation, NOT negotiating leverage. Didn’t work for Trump – won’t work for you,” tweeted Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif late last month. But what if US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (and President Joe Biden) have just decided that reviving the 2015 nuclear …