UPDATED at 9:24 A.M. EDT on 04-05-2023 When Louise Xin, the award-winning Chinese-Swedish fashion designer and human rights activist, visited the European Parliament last June, she received an unusual request from the body: Would she host a fashion show in the conference hall to draw attention to forced labor in the fashion industry? Xin, 28, happily obliged, and held the show on March 28 – the first ever inside the parliament – featuring her eponymous rental only, non-sale couture brand. Nine models of different ethnicities, including two Uyghur women who…
Day: April 4, 2023
Activists find illegal logging evidence in protected area in northern Cambodia
Forest protection activists found more than 200 fallen trees that had been illegally cut down in a vast protected area of northern Cambodia that showed signs of around-the-clock operations, transport trucks, motorcycles and armed security. Activists with the Prey Lang Community Network for Preah Vihear province traveled through the area for four days and three nights in late March. Prime Minister Hun Sen has promised publicly that he would take action to prevent illegal logging in Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary, which covers land in Preah Vihear, Stung Treng, Kampong Thom…
Probe proposes bribery charges for 54 tied to Vietnam repatriation scheme
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security has recommended prosecuting 54 mostly senior officials, including the former vice minister of foreign affairs, over a pay-to-play scheme connected to the repatriation of Vietnamese nationals during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ministry’s Investigation Security Agency said Tuesday that it had completed its probe of the scheme and submitted its findings to the Supreme People’s Court, calling for the 54 people to be charged with giving bribes, receiving bribes, brokering bribes, abusing one’s position as a public servant and appropriating assets by fraud, according to state…
China’s Panda Diplomacy is Not Breeding Conservation
Advertisement This year has already offered a series of unfortunate events for panda enthusiasts in the West. In January, Edinburgh Zoo in the U.K. announced they would send their pandas back to China after they failed to produce cubs. Later that month, Finland said it is considering returning a pair of pandas due to mounting costs. These events have called into question China’s so-called panda diplomacy, an instrument of soft power cloaked as conservation. Although zoos hosting pandas continue to send China millions a year in conservation fees, the population…
Will Xi Jinping outsmart Emmanuel Macron?
Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, had hoped that his visit to China this week would demonstrate European unity and support for his efforts to re-engage with the world’s second-largest economy. To underline the point, he invited Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, to join him on the visit from April 5th to 7th. The pair would speak with “a unified voice”, Mr Macron said. Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the <audio> element. The joint visit…
What China’s Global Security Initiative Tells Us About Its Strategic Engagement with Latin America
Advertisement Chinese engagement with Latin America may be mostly about commerce, but it is nonetheless strategic in its character. Its new Global Security Initiative (GSI) openly highlights the explicitly military and other strategic dimensions of its approach toward Latin America and other parts of the world. The GSI, introduced in 2022 and outlined in February 2023 through a Ministry of Foreign Affairs concept paper compliments the 2013 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the PRC’s Global Development Initiative (GDI) in its evolving and increasingly ambitious narrative about how China seeks…