The Aso government got its wish: North Korea launched its rocket, with the first stage said to have landed off the coast of Akita prefecture and the second said to have landed in the Pacific Ocean.After weeks of posturing, there was no attempt to intercept the debris.It is unclear whether North Korea successfully delivered a …
Tag: China
Recommended book: Will The Boat Sink The Water?, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
Speaking of rural troubles, I have just finished reading Chen Guidi's and Wu Chuntao's Will The Boat Sink The Water?, which documents the poverty of rural China and the hardships imposed on peasants by a bloated bureaucracy. (This book was briefly available in China, but has since been blacklisted.)The first half of the book is …
Continue reading Recommended book: Will The Boat Sink The Water?, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao
At the frontier of political thought in China
This week it seems Wan Gang, a non-CCP party member (he belongs to the nominally independent China Party for the Public Interest), became the first non-communist cabinet minister in decades. The People's Daily noted that Wan views his appointment as an important step in the development of democracy in China.Wan is undoubtedly being overoptimistic in …
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China’s history problems
On my recent trip to China — discussed here — I had a distinct sense of twenty-first century China being a country alienated from its past. Its modern past, the decades following the declaration of the "New China" following the CCP's victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, is passed over in the public …
Making sense of China’s Sudan policy
If there's any sense to be made, that is.In the same week that Amnesty International condemned China for selling arms to Sudan that are purportedly being used in Darfur by Janjaweed militias accused of genocide, China has announced that it is both sending a military detachment to support African Union peacekeepers in Darfur and appointing …
The China enigma
After an afternoon of walking around in slums located within blocks of Tiananmen Square — festooned with flags for the national holiday — I am ever more convinced that the only way to think about China in the early twenty-first century is by drawing upon the Jain parable of the blind men and the elephant.For …
A hazy shade of Beijing
I arrived in Beijing yesterday -- and was immediately struck, even before landing, by the dirty haze that shrouds the city. I had read, of course, about how polluted Beijing has become, but reading about it does not convey just how filthy the air is.Beyond the pollution, it is hard to believe the scale of …
Have China Scholars All Been Bought?
That's the question asked by Carsten Holz, economist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review. (Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily)He asks:Does it matter if China researchers ignore the political context in which they operate and the political constraints that shape their work? Does it …
China is not creating its own risk fleet…yet
In the years before World War I, Imperial Germany developed its "risk fleet" -- a large fleet of relatively little utility -- to force the Royal Navy to focus on defending the British Isles, a textbook example of the concept of a fleet in being.It is with this in mind that I read this op-ed …
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China’s Good Cop?
When I read articles such as this one from the IHT, I have a hard time figuring out if China's Premier Wen Jiabao is simply playing good cop to the PLA's bad cop or if Wen actually believes the argument he advances at every opportunity.If it's the latter, then the bureaucratic infighting within the PRC's …
Tobias S. Harris 