The Pacific may be the part of the world most likely to see “strategic surprise”, the US Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell has said, in comments apparently referring to possible Chinese ambitions to establish Pacific island bases. Campbell told Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies that the United States has “enormous moral, strategic, historical interests” in the Pacific but had not done enough to assist the region, unlike countries such as Australia and New Zealand. “If you look and if you ask me, where are the places where we are…
Day: January 10, 2022
Will China’s Railway in Laos Help Bolster Its ‘Soft Power’?
Advertisement If “soft power” refers to the power of attraction, then a country needs connectivity channels through which it can attract foreign audiences. These channels can be sociocultural, political, ideological, or economic, the latter being perhaps the most tangible. In early December, the government of Laos inaugurated the Laos-China Railway following the arrival in Vientiane of a bullet train from Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan province. Since then, a plethora of articles has covered the development, about which opinions are mixed. Fears of the project becoming a “debt trap”…
China’s Covid Outbreak Complicates Safety Plan for Beijing Olympics
When China’s leader Xi Jinping inspected the Beijing Winter Olympics venues last week, he laid out his vision for a “green, safe and simple” event. But diplomatic boycotts and, increasingly, the fast-spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus may make safety and simplicity near impossible to achieve, at least by Beijing’s stringent “zero Covid” standards. With less than a month to go until the opening of the Winter Games, Chinese officials are racing to extinguish a spate of coronavirus infections around the country, including several locally transmitted cases of the Omicron…
KMT Served Double Defeat in Taiwan’s Latest Recall and By-Election
Advertisement A recall vote in Taipei and by-election in Taichung resulted in a double victory for the pan-Green camp on Saturday, with independent legislator Freddy Lim defending his seat in Taipei and Lin Ching-yi of the DPP winning over Yen Kuan-heng of the KMT. Lim is one of Taiwan’s most internationally known politicians. One of the cohort of young activists that ran for office after the 2014 Sunflower Movement, Lim is also the frontman of the death metal band Chthonic. Lim also served as president of Amnesty International Taiwan from…
China battles Omicron outbreak weeks before Winter Olympics
China is battling to stamp out its first outbreak of the Omicron variant, only weeks before the Chinese new year and the Beijing Winter Olympics, with cases recorded in at least two distant provinces. On Monday, health authorities reported 97 new locally transmitted cases for the preceding 24 hours, across several cities. At least 30 cases were in Henan province, while at least 31 new cases were reported in the Tianjin, including 15 children aged five to 15. At least two of the cases detected in the city’s Jinnan district…
WeChat adds list of data it collects as Tencent aims to comply with China’s strict new regulations
WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging super app operated by Tencent Holdings, is rolling out an update that includes a detailed list of the personal information that it collects, the latest move from the company to comply with strict new laws and regulations in China governing user data.The list can be found in the settings of the latest version of the app, which is currently still in beta testing on Android devices. It includes basic user information, devices associated with the account, contacts…South China Morning Post