Category: Dictatorships

Kremlin running scared? Russia’s regions ‘in revolt’

     

While Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrates 20 years in the Kremlin and poses as a powerful world leader, his Russian Federation is showing increasing signs of fracture, according to Janusz Bugajski, a senior… Read more »

Setback for autocrats use of sharp power to subvert the West

     

Zdenek Hrib had been in office for only a couple of months when he first locked horns with Beijing. The youthful mayor of Prague was welcoming diplomats to a reception… Read more »

China’s annus horribilis: Authoritarian turn ‘challenges the world’

     

More than a dozen Chinese lawyers and activists are reportedly missing or were detained by authorities in the final days of 2019 as part of the Chinese government’s year-end crackdown… Read more »

Russia’s Murder, Inc.’s long, dark history

     

  President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday Russia is not planning to create a military alliance with China, despite Moscow helping Beijing build a missile attack warning system, Reuters reports… Read more »

China must close Xinjiang ‘re-education camps’: Uyghur academic Ilham Tohti wins Sakharov Prize

     

A five-year-old Uyghur boy who was left in the care of grandparents because his parents are incarcerated for religious and political reasons was found frozen to death in a ditch… Read more »

China’s Civilizational Challenge – a great leap forward to ….. ?

     

Beijing’s response to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests demonstrates that far from enabling China’s peaceful reunification, the “one country, two systems” model is undermining it, argues Chin-Huat Wong, a professor of… Read more »

China ramping up blueprint for digital totalitarian state

     

Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private… Read more »

Iran’s totalitarianism, weak civil society could prompt ‘social explosion’

     

Prominent Iranian artists, inside and outside the country, have reacted to the brutal crackdown of recent protests in Iran, The Independent reports (HT:FDD). Amnesty International says Iranian authorities are continuing… Read more »

Why China’s TikTok is a national security concern

     

TikTok, the short-form video app that’s been downloaded 1.5 billion times, is one of the most exciting and goofiest places on the internet, and possibly the only truly fun social… Read more »