Maoism: The Most Severe Threat to China
OUYANG BINMa Licheng (马立诚) is a former Senior Editorials Editor at People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s most important mouthpiece, and the author of eleven books. In 2003, when Japan’s then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine inflamed China’s anti-Japan sentiment, Ma published an essay in the magazine Strategy and Management entitled “New Thinking on Relations with Japan.” In it, he argued China should transcend its historical hatred of its neighbor. The essay sparked intense debate. Ma’s...
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Sino-American Relations: Amour or Les Miserables?
WINSTON LORDWinston Lord, former United States Ambassador to China, tells us he recently hacked into the temples of government, pecking at his first-generation iPad with just one finger—a clear sign that both Beijing and Washington need to beef up their cyber defenses. Below, we share with you the secret transmissions he unearthed—the minutes of two very important meetings—followed by ten policy prescriptions Ambassador Lord found engraved on a stone tablet resting on a mountaintop.—The...
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Christopher Hill on North Korea’s Provocations
OUYANG BINThe first months of 2013 have seen a rapid intensification of combative rhetoric and action from North Korea. In the sixteen months since Kim Jong-un assumed leadership of the country, North Korea has run through the whole litany of provocations his father’s regime had deployed...
‘Hi! I’m Fang!’ The Man Who Changed China
PERRY LINKIn China in the 1980s, the word renquan (“human rights”) was extremely “sensitive.” Few dared even to utter it in public, let alone to champion the concept. Now, nearly three decades later, a grassroots movement called weiquan (“supporting rights”) has spread widely,...
For Many in China, the One Child Policy is Already...
LESLIE T. CHANGBefore getting pregnant with her second child, Lu Qingmin went to the family-planning office to apply for a birth permit. Officials in her husband’s Hunan village where she was living turned her down, but she had the baby anyway. She may eventually be fined $1,600—about what...
China at the Tipping Point?
PERRY LINK, XIAO QIANGOf all the transformations that Chinese society has undergone over the past fifteen years, the most dramatic has been the growth of the Internet. Information now circulates and public opinions are now expressed on electronic bulletin boards with nationwide reach such as Tianya...
A Beginning for China’s Battered Women
YING ZHULike it or not, it takes an American woman to give a face, bring a voice, and deliver a victory to battered women in China. On February 3, a milestone court decision in Beijing granted a divorce to Kim Lee, a victim of domestic abuse, from her celebrity...
The Big Enterprise
ORVILLE SCHELLIn days of yore, when a new dynasty was established in China and a new emperor was enthroned, it was known as dashi, “The Big Enterprise,” and it usually involved mass social upheaval and civil war. The latter-day version of changing leaders now takes place at Party...
Will Xi Jinping Differ from His Predecessors?
ANDREW J. NATHANAs part of our continuing series on China’s recent leadership transition, Arthur Ross Fellow Ouyang Bin sat down with political scientist Andrew Nathan, who published his latest book, China’s Search for Security, in September.In the three videos below, Nathan discusses newly...
Is Xi Jinping a Reformer? It’s Much Too Early to Tell
RACHEL BEITARIE, JEFFREY WASSERSTROMLast weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the pages of The New York Times that he feels moderately confident China will experience resurgent economic reform and probably political reform as well under the leadership of recently installed Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping...
Age of China’s New Leaders May Have Been Key to...
SUSAN SHIRKEarlier this week, before the new Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) and Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party were announced, I argued that the Party faces the difficult problem of how to allocate power in the absence of an open and legitimate leadership selection process. I...
The Future of Legal Reform
CARL MINZNERCarl Minzner, Professor of Law at Fordham University, talks here about the ways China’s legal reforms have ebbed and flowed, speeding up in the early 2000s, but then slowing down again after legal activists began to take the government at its word, attempting to use the letter...
China’s Next Leaders: A Guide to What’s at Stake
SUSAN SHIRKJust a little more than a week after the American presidential election, China will choose its own leaders in its own highly secretive way entirely inside the Communist Party. What’s at stake for China—and for the rest of the world—is not just who will fill which leadership...
Change in Historical Context
PETER PERDUEChina’s Communist Party has only ruled the country since 1949. But China has a long history of contentious transfers of power among its ruler. In these videos, Yale historian, Peter C. Perdue, an expert on China's last dynasty, the Qing, puts China’s current leadership...
Are You Happier Than You Were Ten Years Ago?
J. MICHAEL EVANS“Many Chinese feel that they have not participated in the economic benefits of an economy that has been growing very rapidly,” says Michael Evans, a vice chairman of the Goldman Sachs Group and head of growth markets for the Wall Street investment bank. Nowadays, many...
Pragmatism and Patience
HAMID BIGLARIHamid Bilgari, Vice Chairman of Citicorp, the strategic arm of Citigroup, is a leader in international investment banking. Bilgari says that pragmatism and patience are the dominant qualities exhibited by cultures facing major change, such as the leadership transition at...
Who is Xi Jinping?
ORVILLE SCHELLIn an era of great change and economic uncertainty around the world, one might expect a leadership transition at the top of one of the world’s rising powers to shine a light on that country’s prospective next leaders so the public might form an opinion of them and decide...
Dirty Air and Succession Jitters Clouding Beijing’s...
STEPHEN OLIVER, SUSAN SHIRKLast week the Chinese government accused the U.S. Embassy and consulates of illegally interfering in China’s domestic affairs by publishing online hourly air-quality information collected from their own monitoring equipment. (While the critiques didn’t name the U.S., the U.S...
The Sweet and the Sour in China-U.S. Relations
WINSTON LORDAt this very hour, one early May, just shy of a half century ago, I married a girl from Shanghai and we launched our joint adventure.Ever since, Bette Bao and I have practiced the precept of Adam Smith—division of labor. She manages our finances and real estate. I changed the...
Chen Guangcheng: A Hopeful Breakthrough?
ORVILLE SCHELLThe arrival of the celebrated Chinese rights activist, Chen Guangcheng in the U.S. after years of prison and house arrest, raises the larger question of what the whole incident will come to mean in terms of the status of dissidents in China and in U.S.-China relations.In the...