A tough fight against corruption and a firm increase of their budget. President Xi Jinping is using both sticks and carrots to get the powerful military establishment into line, writes defense analyst Wendell Minnick in Defense News.Read More →
Finally the government takes pollution serious, long after its citizens noted the dangers, concludes journalist Ian Johnson in ChinaFile, after a smog documentary was taken off the internet. But censors acted after 100 million Chinese watched the much-praised movie, that sparked off an unprecedented debate.Read More →
China´s lawmakers are preparing for their annual sessions of the advisory CPPCC and the National People´s Congress. Among them a large amount of influential business people. Political analyst Victor Shih explains the interaction between business and politics in China in the New York Times.Read More →
Author Zhang Lijia looked – at the request of Al Jazeera – back at the history of the famous CCTV New Year gala, attracting each year hundreds of million viewers, with a major impacts on China´s citizens. Her main advice: “de-politicization of the show. The most important thing is to let people to have some fun as they deserve on the special occasion.”Read More →
Political relations between China and India are tense, and Indian internet users follow the issue closely. The opposite happens at the other side of the border, says Kaiser Kuo, director international communication of Baidu in the Beijing Review. “The sad truth is that most Chinese just don’t think that often about India.”Read More →
The reforms of president Xi Jinping are gathering steam, writes political analyst Arthur Kroeber for the Brookings Institute. Xi´s struggle goes beyond just consolidating power, and is more about governance than economics, he argues.Read More →
Coal used to be literally gold in China, but those days are over. Formal coal capital Lüliang has now been the center of president Xi Jinping´s anti-corruption drive, writes journalist Ian Johnson in the New York Times. A case study on disrupting the Party establishment.Read More →
Economist Arthur Kroeber argued last week that China´s leadership accepts that its authoritarian strength triggers off collateral damage: it will never become a leader in technology or soft power, including censorship. Journalist Ian Johnson disagrees in the ChinaFile, the people might not accept that trade-off.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson meets James Leibold, eminent researcher on China´s policies on ethnic minorities. After a dive into China´s historical take on Xinjiang, both dive into the current tense situation and recent violence. Ian Johnson asks questions for the New York Times.Read More →
Journalist Ian Johnson interviewed civil-right lawyer Teng Biao on the current political situation, just ahead of the annual plenum of the Communist Party for the New York Review of Books. A fragment about the Re-education Through Labor Camps.Read More →
China celebrates on Tuesday its first ´martyrs´day´ on September 30, a expression of new-found patriotism to remember those who died in fights with foreign powers. Journalist Ian Johnson at the New York Times digs into the reasons for this new celebration.Read More →
The much awarded journalist Ian Johnson is joining today the China Speakers Bureau. Working in China since 1984, Ian worked for the Wall Street Journal as feature writer and bureau chief for twelve years.He is currently living in Beijing and Berlin as an independent journalist, working both for the New York Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal.Read More →