On July 1, the PRC celebrated the very remarkable event that occurred exactly 25 years earlier with the return of Hong Kong to the country. It was not only extremely important for China itself, but also had a significant foreign policy component. And the importance of foreign politics only increases with time. This was borne…
Whenever American administrations change, usually only the heads of various agencies and a few folks below them are replaced. Sometimes this is substantive, other times it’s only cosmetic, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the members of its military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) remain the same. The…
Midway in a week of shocking news, I awakened last Wednesday to a piece in Asia Sentinel that made my heart sink lower than everything else I had read by then. Our apple-pie authoritarianism, now manifest in a frenzy of censorship, is frightening enough. What is going on in Hong Kong is magnitudes worse. An…
China finalised its campaign against protests in its Hong Kong territory when it expelled opposition politicians from Hong Kong’s government for endangering national security. Following this move, opposition politicians still in office resigned in protest, leaving the territory’s government firmly pro-Beijing. This came after a sweeping security law was passed which focused heavily on cutting…
The current state of affairs in Hong Kong and Taiwan remains one of the key sources of tensions plaguing the relationship between the two world powers, i.e. the United States and the PRC. There was yet another rise in anti-Chinese sentiment in Washington in response to the passing of the Hong Kong national security law…
The arrest of Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai has sent Western news outlets into a tizzy. We are told that “free speech” is under attack by the Chinese authorities who are supposedly rolling back democracy on the semiautonomous island city. Lai was arrested in the offices of his media company and led away in handcuffs by…
