Tag: Chinese Communist Party
The Angst Behind China’s ‘Lying Flat’ Youth
On Halloween in 2022, outside a party the police had just disbanded in Beijing’s warehouse district, I saw a 20-something woman in a sparkly spandex suit and bunny ears run into the road. “Freedom, not testing!” she shouted. “Reform, not revolution! Votes, not dictators! Citizens, not slaves!”
Those were familiar words at Tsinghua University, where I was studying for a master’s degree. From a bridge near campus, someone had hung a banner emblazoned with the slogans. The banner’s
Xi Jinping’s Deceptive Embrace of Business
With China struggling economically, the CCP has taken a supposedly pro-business turn. Don’t buy it.
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The Fracturing of Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement
Andrew Chiu, a prodemocracy district councilor in Hong Kong, was attempting to stop a knife-wielding assailant from attacking protesters in November 2019 when the attacker broke free and lunged at him. The man pulled Chiu close in a belligerent embrace, sank his teeth into Chiu’s left ear, then snapped his head back and, as Chiu reached up to find blood spilling from his head, spat a sinuous chunk of flesh onto the brick sidewalk.
An attempt to reattach Chiu’s ear
China’s War Against Taiwan Has Already Started
In 2018, a typhoon stranded thousands of people at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, Japan. Among them were some tourists from Taiwan. Normally, this story might not have had much political meaning. But a few hours into the incident, an obscure Taiwanese news website began reporting on what it said was the failure of Taiwanese diplomats to rescue their citizens. A handful of bloggers began posting on social media, too, excitedly praising Chinese officials who had sent buses
Taiwan Wants China to Think Twice About an Invasion
Taiwan’s presidential offices are located in a sprawling, stately complex built by the Japanese colonial administration in the early 20th century—a reminder that, for all the belligerent rhetoric coming from the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan has not been firmly under Beijing’s control for well over 100 years. When I arrived at the offices in September for an interview with President Tsai Ing-wen, it occurred to me that the large tower rising above the entrance might become a target in the
How Safe Is Elon Musk’s Bet on Tesla in China?
Tesla CEO Elon Musk once called President Joe Biden “a damp [sock] puppet in human form.” To Senator Bernie Sanders, he tweeted: “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” But in front of a very different sort of politician, trash-talking Musk turned to mush.
When China’s ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, visited Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, earlier this year, Musk could not have been more courteous. The two took a spin in a
The Tech Site That Took On China’s Surveillance State
BETHLEHEM, Pa.—Behind Heights Market & Deli (“Home of the Hoagie”) and next to Finishers Mixed Martial Arts gym, in a neighborhood of tidy lawns adorned with reflective gazing balls, sits a mundane warehouse that is the headquarters of an obscure news organization with an equally mundane name: Internet Protocol Video Market. The nondescript location gives little clue about what kind of journalistic enterprise goes on here.
IPVM’s office has no newsroom with reporters clacking on keyboards and TVs playing cable
How the Anti-war Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt
In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper
When Biden Went to China
On April 19, 1979, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware was in Beijing, meeting with China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, when he put Washington’s nascent friendship with the Communists to the test.
That Biden was sitting there at all was remarkable. The United States and China had been implacable foes for decades. In Washington, Deng and his cadres were seen as a dangerous arm of the Red menace, their conquest of China 30 years earlier bitterly lamented as its “loss” to
Republicans Are Playing Into Putin and Xi’s Hands
Russian President Vladimir Putin pines for the old Russian empire and takes Ukraine’s independence as a personal affront. But the invasion of Ukraine is not a limited regional dispute between neighbors. Putin is also motivated by a deep opposition to democracy more broadly. That is why he has waged a long-running shadow war to destabilize free societies and discredit democratic institutions in the United States and around the world. Ukraine is one flash point in a larger global struggle