Category: Civil Society

As coronavirus threatens legitimacy, China targets victims and critics

     

The Chinese authorities are clamping down as grieving relatives, along with activists, press the ruling Communist Party for an accounting of what went wrong in Wuhan, where the coronavirus killed… Read more »

Democracy’s place in a new post-Covid world order

     

International orders seldom change in noticeable ways, according to Edward Fishman, a former member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an… Read more »

Incompetence, impatience & impotence: Russia shows same traits that befell USSR

     

  The way Russian pro-governmental media approached Hungary’s “coronavirus coup” stand-off with the EU in the time of COVID-19 is in line with the outlets’ long-term attitude towards Hungary, notes… 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 »

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 »