Month: September 2024

The announcement came at a routine press briefing on September 5th. Mao Ning, a foreign-ministry spokesperson, said China was grateful for the “desire and love” of the foreign families who wanted to adopt Chinese children. But, she added, China would no longer allow the practice. Exceptions would be made for foreigners adopting stepchildren and children of blood relatives in China. For everyone else the new policy would take effect immediately, meaning even adoptions already in progress would be halted. The Economist

“FROM CHAOS to order, from stability to prosperity.” That is Xi Jinping’s goal for Hong Kong. Ever since pro-democracy protests swept the city in 2019, China’s ruler has tried to reimpose control. In many ways he has succeeded. Today Hong Kong is less tumultuous than it was back then. The covid-19 pandemic, which saw the city close itself to the world, helped to calm things down. So have two draconian national-security laws, one imposed on the city by the central government in 2020 and another adopted by the local legislature…

China’s Communist Party has over 99m members. So it is no surprise that some are not up to scratch. The corrupt, criminal or disloyal are handled by the party’s fearsome internal-investigation arm, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. It has punished thousands of officials in recent years. But that still leaves another kind of troublesome member: those who have not broken any laws, but just aren’t very good communists. The Economist

Walk into the All Sages Bookstore in north-western Beijing, and you enter a different world. Not here the collections of speeches by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that greet visitors to state-owned bookshops—rows of covers with the same face, the same beneficent smile. The founder of All Sages, Liu Suli, served 20 months in prison for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His shelves are filled with the works of free thinkers: economists and political scientists, historians and legal scholars. The potential market could be bigger than it…