Category: China

For the record, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did not say this: The United States has named China, Iran, Libya, North Korea and 10 other nations that it wants the U.N. to hold accountable for alleged human rights violations. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council said Wednesday “too many governments repress dissent with impunity.” [….] She said the U.S. opposes China’s “growing number of arrests and detentions of lawyers, activists, bloggers, artists, religious believers, and their families.” Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did...

While I don’t believe that this story means that the Chinese political system is in imminent danger of collapse, I do think it illustrates that as technology advances, the system is one recession away from a political cataclysm. Jittery Chinese authorities wary of any domestic dissent staged a concerted show of force Sunday to squelch a mysterious online call for a “Jasmine Revolution” apparently modeled after pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping the Middle East. Authorities detained activists, increased the number of police...

The Washington Post, reporting on the ground work for President Obama’s Asia tour, reports that U.S.-China relations are abysmal. I would say they’re as bad now as they’ve been since at least the EP-3 Incident, and that they’re almost sure to get worse when Xi Jinping takes over as China’s new leader. It’s not Barack Obama’s fault that Xi is obnoxious even by the standards of the Chinese Communist Party, but it’s clear that Obama’s early deferential outreach to China...