Month: July 2021

Jul 8th 2021 HONG KONG PROPAGANDISTS HAD teed it up as one of this year’s blockbusters. The film “1921”, named after the year China’s Communist Party was born, was intended to grip the imaginations of young people with the story of the party’s founding 100 years ago this month. Mao Zedong would be played by different actors depending on his age in the scene depicted. One of them would be Yan Xujia, a 19-year-old pop star who frequently appears on reality television. In mid-May the heartthrob’s profile appeared on promotional…

Advertisement After Didi Chuxing Technology Co., a powerhouse Chinese ride-hailing app, launched a massive initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, it found itself in hot water with domestic regulators. On July 4, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced a ban of the app from all app stores in China, citing serious violations of collection and use of personal data. This decision came swiftly, just two days after the CAC said it was initiating a cybersecurity probe of the firm. This latest review and penalty on Didi…

Advertisement On June 30, the statement “One quarter of party members are aged below 35” appeared ranked second on Baidu’s purported “hot search terms.” As with much of the country, the search engine’s main page was decked out with a red national flag and “100” in golden letters. On the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party’s founding, the Party clearly wishes to challenge the perception of an organization dominated by old men, even though the proportion of younger members indicated by that statement doesn’t necessarily prove the point. The topic…

Advertisement On July 5, 2009, unrest erupted in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in response to the murder of two Uyghur laborers by Han colleagues in Guangdong. Clashes between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, including the police, lasted until July 7, 2009, resulting in the deaths of nearly 200 people. Since then, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the language of extremism and terrorism to justify its assault on the region’s Muslim population. Xi Jinping, on his first visit to Xinjiang as president in 2014, labelled the region the “front line against…

Advertisement Since Xi Jinping’s first proposed a “21st Century Silk Road” during his visit to Kazakhstan in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been defined as China’s regeneration of trade with Eurasia. The BRI has evolved to become the central concern of the economic relationship with Central Asia and the Middle East. Purposefully recalling the ancient Silk Roads that connected Europe and the Middle East with Chinese imperial dynasties, China has been investing its efforts and capital to revitalize infrastructures and boost economic exchange with developing countries in Asia…

Jul 4th 2021 CHINA’S NUCLEAR arsenal is piddling by American or Russian standards. The country has scarcely 200 warheads, reckons America’s Department of Defence, and perhaps 100 or so inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Until last week it had only 16 known silos for latest-generation ICBMs. So eyebrows were raised when satellite imagery revealed 120 new ones being built in the desert of Gansu province, in western China. The silos, near the city of Yumen, were identified by researchers from the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, an American think-tank, whose…

Jul 3rd 2021 FOR ALL who believe that people are endowed with inalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, it was alarming to hear the loud applause and cheers that greeted Xi Jinping on July 1st, the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party. Speaking at Tiananmen Square, China’s leader had just pledged that any foreigner who tried to bully China would “dash their heads against a Great Wall of steel, forged from the flesh…

Jul 3rd 2021 HONG KONG TWO VEGETARIAN meals each day. A monthly budget of 200 yuan ($30). Working just one or two months a year. In April an internet user posted this brief description of his simple, stress-free life. He described his philosophy as tangping, or “lying flat”. “I can be like Diogenes, who slept in his wine cask in the sun,” he wrote. He included a photo of himself doing an appropriate job: playing a corpse in a film. Listen to this story Your browser does not support the…

Advertisement China will graduate from a middle-income to a high-income country in a few years. Its GDP per capita has grown explosively from $150 in 1978 to $10,000 today and is on course to surpass the World Bank’s high-income country threshold of $12,536 in 2023. Though this may sound like a symbolic change, the impacts on China’s climate ambitions can be far-reaching. This is because global climate change efforts are rooted in countries contributing based on their income level, so becoming a high-income country adds pressure on China. In U.N.…

Advertisement The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is riding high on a narrative of complete triumph as it marked its centenary on July 1 with pomp, pageantry, and propaganda. Internal discourse is brimming with commentary about the perseverance of the CCP, which has defied expectations of decay, democratization, and even demise in its 100-year journey. Even a recent manned space mission has been swept up in the patriotic extravaganza, with one astronaut saying the mission had “added a heroic chapter to the 100-year history of the struggle of the Party.” Despite its…