Tens of millions older Chinese are struggling with poverty and loneliness as their children flee villages for cities. Decades of societal turmoil — radical communism followed by rampant capitalism — have frayed the ties that once bound the nation’s families together.
Wison’s disclosure is the latest public signs of a spreading corruption inquiry into the China National Petroleum Corporation that has brought down one senior Chinese Communist Party official.
Though he is often accused of being ineffectual, it is actually a rare show of decisiveness that has lost Ma Ying-jeou recent support. At issue is his handling of alleged wrongdoing by a titan of Mr. Ma’s Kuomintang (K.M.T.), Wang Jin-pyng.
Prominent Uighur rights advocate Ilham Tohti called the local government’s move an effort to “dilute the religious environment” in the area, where minority Uighurs often complain of ethnic and religious repression.
The National Audit Office’s investigation of 45 counties in nine provinces and municipalities from 2009-12 found 1.6 billion yuan ($260 million) in fines had been given out in contravention of the rules, Chinese newspapers said.
A great deal of speculation surrounds China’s prospects in science and innovation, as with other aspects of China’s development and heightened visibility on the global stage. The same pitfalls—of hype, generalization, and only partial awareness of the domestic political, economic, and cultural context—mean that discussion of this topic in Europe and the U.S. can sometimes obscure as much as it illuminates. China’s innovation system is advancing so rapidly in multiple directions that the U.K. needs to develop a more ambitious and tailored strategy, able to maximize opportunities and minimize risks across the diversity of its innovation links to China. For the U.K., the choice is not whether to engage more deeply with the Chinese system, but how. Innovation is caught up in a bigger unfolding debate about the pace, scale, and direction of China’s economic and political reforms. Much still depends upon the playing out of a set of tensions: between the planned economy and the market; national and global priorities; the hardware of research infrastructure and the software of culture and ethics; the skills and creativity of home–grown talent, and the entrepreneurialism and networks of returnees. In the decades to come, China is likely to change innovation just as much as innovation changes China.
In the past, conventional militaries were plagued by wartime oil shortages that severely undermined their battlefield effectiveness. But could oil shortages threaten military effectiveness in a large-scale conventional conflict today or in the future? Observers commonly assume that the amount of oil consumed today for military purposes is small compared to production and civilian demand, and thus that wartime shortages are unlikely. But this assumption has not been subject to rigorous evaluation in the unclassified literature. In this Energy Report, Rosemary Kelanic argues that it is flawed. The Energy Report analyzes a potential air war between the People's Republic of China and Taiwan—to enhance broader knowledge about fuel requirements in wartime. Insight gained from modeling such a conflict makes it possible to provide a rough estimate of potential fuel requirements and assess whether military demand could strain countries’ supplies in the present, as it did in the past. Kelanic ultimately concludes that oil and fuel supplies could become significant constraints on China and Taiwan in the event of war. She also argues that this prospect helps illuminate Chinese oil security strategies, including strategic stockpiling and efforts to diversify supply routes for imported oil.
