Category: Dictatorships

Beijing blasts Western critics who ‘smear’ China with ‘sharp power’

     

Beijing issued a harsh rebuke of Western critics who accuse China of using soft power as a vehicle to infiltrate other countries, as it kicked off its biggest political event… Read more »

Is Vietnam going the way of China?

     

Activist Pham Doan Trang (above) said she was held for questioning by security officials for several hours on Saturday over her most recent book Politics for the Masses, which is outlawed… Read more »

Xi sets China on ‘collision course with history’ or new model for authoritarianism?

     

  China’s relentless rise and its more recent embrace of repressive tactics that recall the Mao era — a process accelerated by President Xi Jinping’s bid to stay in power indefinitely — have… Read more »

‘Leader of unfree world’ – China’s Xi is ‘courting political catastrophe’

     

In ending presidential term limits, China’s president Xi Jinping – the leader of the unfree world –  is ‘thinking global and acting local’, The South China Morning Post’s Nectar Gan… Read more »

Time to start shredding Putin Playbook

     

Social media platforms are failing to make the changes that would help curb online disinformation and fake news despite the efforts made since the 2016 US presidential election exposed the… Read more »

Xi’s ‘dictator-for-life’ move could harm China’s sharp power

     

The surprise disclosure on Sunday that the Communist Party was abolishing constitutional limits on presidential terms — effectively allowing President Xi Jinping to lead China indefinitely — was the latest and arguably… Read more »

Rights activists mourn death of Li Baiguang, Chinese democracy advocate

     

A well-known Chinese rights lawyer died suddenly in hospital of liver failure on Monday (Feb 26), Reuters reports: Li Baiguang, a Christian human rights lawyer who had met regularly with high-level officials… Read more »

Democracies need bipartisan, holistic response to Russian ‘full spectrum’ operations

     

Vladimir Putin doesn’t tweet and he claims he doesn’t have a smartphone. But he has something likely more important than gadgets — long experience in the KGB and its post-Soviet… Read more »

China’s digital totalitarian state enjoying a ‘golden field for propaganda’

     

  A “shocking new report” from Canada’s intelligence service cites China’s domestically-focused propaganda as an example of the “total” information warfare posing an existential threat to Western democratic pluralism. Ever… Read more »