‘China’s Coming Upheaval’: Brittle fragility exposed
The events of the past few months have shown that the Chinese Communist Party’s rule is far more brittle than many believed, bolstering the case for a strategy of sustained… Read more »
Category: China
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 »
‘From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate’: Have Liu Xiaobo’s fears been realized?
Liberal Senator @SenPaterson says China’s threat to impose “economic sanctions” on Australia if it conducts an independent inquiry into the source of the coronavirus shows the Chinese Communist Party is “extremely… Read more »
COVID-19’s regime-type fallacy: Autocrats also feeling strain
The novel coronavirus is compounding preexisting threats to press freedoms around the world, according to a new report by the international watchdog organization Reporters Without Borders, ABC News reports: Reporters… Read more »
China’s ‘hub and spoke strategy’: COVID-19 geopolitical turning point?
COVID-19 signals a global paradigm shift because even before the pandemic, the world was already in the grips of a far-reaching transformation, analyst Ullrich Fichtner writes for Der Spiegel. The… Read more »
‘Beginning of the end’ for Hong Kong? Two systems ‘dead as a Dodo’
Hong Kong activists are planning to take advantage of forthcoming opportunities to counter the recent crackdown on the pro-democracy movement. “We’re only at half-time in the match,” one activist suggested…. Read more »
COVID-19 pandemic reveals malfeasance, misrule & maladroit propaganda
In the absence of global democratic leadership, China is taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to proclaim the superiority of its authoritarian model, notes Keith B. Richburg, director of the… Read more »
Inside Wuhan: China’s struggle to control the virus — and the narrative
Hao Jun, in his late forties, is one of a small but tight-knit group of dissidents based in Wuhan who took it upon themselves to document the earliest days of… Read more »
COVID-19’s new pretexts for consolidating autocrats’ power
Authoritarian-minded leaders around the world have used the coronavirus emergency to consolidate power. In Europe, the governments of Poland and Hungary have done that and more. They have managed to… Read more »