Category: Dictatorships

Philippines at risk of succumbing to dictatorship?

     

  Anti-establishment firebrand Rodrigo Duterte secured a huge win in the Philippine presidential elections, according to a poll monitor on Tuesday (May 10), after an incendiary campaign dominated by his… Read more »

Obama must raise Vietnam’s rights abuses, civil society crackdown

     

Thich Quang Do, the Patriarch of Vietnam’s Unified Buddhist Church (left), has called on U.S. president Barack Obama to use his forthcoming trip to the Communist state to highlight continuing… Read more »

The real purpose of China’s new anti-NGO law

     

China’s new anti-NGO law is evidence of a xenophobic shift in the country’s politics, an anti-foreign turn driven by several related trends, The Wall Street Journal notes: First, President Xi Jinping has… Read more »

New isolationism or a strategy for democratic renewal?

     

A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this, The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens writes: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing… Read more »

Cubans getting bolder in acts against government

     

More than a month after ordinary Cubans jubilantly welcomed President Barack Obama to Havana, the Communist government is finding it hard to dampen the afterglow, AP reports: But few people… Read more »

India denies visas to Chinese dissidents

     

India has declined to issue visas to two Chinese activists hoping to attend a conference on promoting democracy, days after it revoked a visa for an exiled ethnic Uighur leader… Read more »

An ‘existential threat’ in China’s future?

     

More than halfway through his five-year term as president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party—expected to be the first of at least two—Xi Jinping’s widening crackdown… Read more »

China prompts criticism with new curbs on foreign NGOs

     

China took a major step on Thursday in President Xi Jinping’s movement away from Western influences and toward stronger social control, as it passed a new law aimed at limiting the work… Read more »

Russia’s internet censor enlists China’s Firewall expertise

     

For an authoritarian government looking to tighten control of an unruly internet, who better to call than the architect of China’s “great firewall”? That was the thinking of Konstantin Malofeev, a multimillionaire… Read more »