Category: Asia

How to counter China’s strategy for ‘hollowing out’ Hong Kong

     

Beijing’s top political office in Hong Kong has called protesters a “political virus” and said the semi-autonomous city will never be calm until “poisonous” and “violent” black-clad demonstrators are eliminated, the… Read more »

China faces backlash as pandemic sets stage for ideological contest

     

China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned… Read more »

Challenging the squeeze on media freedom

     

  Advocates for independent news media used Sunday’s World Press Freedom Day to call attention to what’s been dubbed the “coronavirus crackdown,” CNN reports. Journalists in numerous countries have been harassed, threatened… Read more »

Why China’s propaganda efforts backfire

     

A journalist who had worked for some of China’s most powerful propaganda outlets has been jailed for 15 years after being accused of attacking the ruling Communist Party, AFP reports:… Read more »

Chris Patten urges investigation into coronavirus origins

     

Britain’s last colonial governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has asked the British government to watch out for Chinese attempts to interfere with the city’s affairs while the world grapples… Read more »

Democracies vulnerable to crisis: Covid exacerbates weaknesses, says BTI

     

The COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the very weaknesses that have marked the democratic erosion of the last decade in most of the 137 developing and transformation countries examined in the… Read more »

How China exploits the pandemic it helped cause

     

The coronavirus pandemic that rages across the globe is a fire China helped light. The Chinese government spent weeks denying and downplaying the severity of its growing coronavirus outbreak – obfuscation cost nations… Read more »

Quality of democracy reaches new low – but ‘glimmers of hope’

     

The quality of democracy, market economy and governance reached its lowest level since 2004 when the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI) was first published, it reported today. Limits on freedom… Read more »