I read with interest your editorial (The Guardian view on China’s censors: the sense of an (acceptable) ending, 24 August). In 2016, I was about to publish a book on pop art, which had a short section on artists responding to political and social turmoil in the 1960s, and which included an illustration of Jim Dine’s Drag – Johnson and Mao (1967). The etching depicts Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China and the US president Lyndon B Johnson, who sent troops to counter Chinese communist support in the…
Day: August 29, 2022
What’s Driving China’s Chip Sector Crackdown?
Advertisement During a quiet summer for Chinese politics, one part of the political machinery has been conspicuously active: the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI). Since mid-July, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s anti-graft agency has probed at least eight senior executives in China’s semiconductor industry, all linked to the China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, nicknamed the “Big Fund.” Among the executives being investigated are Ding Wenwu (a former Big Fund president), Diao Shijing (a former Big Fund chairman), and Zhao Weiguo (a former chairman of Big Fund portfolio…
China Charges 28 People, Months After Brutal Beating of Women
HONG KONG — A group of men caught on camera violently beating several women at a barbecue restaurant in June were charged on Monday, part of a wider investigation into the criminal activities of a local gang in the Chinese city of Tangshan. More than a dozen officials and police officers are also under investigation for corruption, more than two months after the brutal attack unleashed a torrent of outrage over violence against women. The government has emphasized that the episode, which shocked the nation, was related to broader “evil…
Xi’s Color Revolution Obsession
Xi Jinping wishes to defeat “Color Revolutions” by defeating the United States China’s leader Xi Jinping had, in conversations with the then U.S. President Barack Obama over a decade ago, spoken of China being the target of “color revolutions” (New York Times, Aug. 7, 2022) — a phrase adopted from Russia, ostensibly to show how the West engineered revolutions in former Soviet territories. This wasn’t Xi Jinping’s first complaint. During a visit to Mexico three years earlier, he bitterly vented his rage: “A few foreigners, with full bellies, have nothing…
China prosecutes 28 people over restaurant attack on group of women
Chinese prosecutors have launched criminal proceedings against 28 people suspected of assaulting a group of women in a viral incident that sparked outrage over gender-based violence in the country. Footage of a group of men assaulting four women at a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan, east of the capital, Beijing, was shared widely online, renewing debate about violence against women in China. The men carried out the assault after the women rejected their advances, the footage showed. Prosecutors in Hebei province said they would begin legal proceedings against the suspects –…