There is a custom in Chinese diplomacy that the Foreign Minister’s first overseas trip of the year always begins in Africa. This year was no exception, as Wang Yi led a high-profile tour of five African states including Kenya, Sudan, the DR Congo, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea. Wang opened the tour on a somewhat provocative note by challenging critics who believe Beijing is attempting to build a new empire in Africa.
Can judicial reform increase the courts' independence by reducing local government and party influence?
The yuan is not yet fully convertible and will not be for several years, which limits China's influence.
Education minister says books which ‘smear socialism’ will be banned.
Cai Guangliao, a major general in the paramilitary armed police, accepted bribes, illegally engaging in business activities and accepting gifts.
James Carter holds a Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History from Yale University and is Professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he teaches courses on China and East Asia. He has written broadly on Chinese-Western relations and nationalism in China, including Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City, 1916-1932 and Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk, as well as serving as Editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China.
A Fellow in the National Committee on US-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program, Carter is currently writing Down to the Wire: A Day at the Races and the End of Old Shanghai, set during 1941 in Shanghai’s International Settlement.
Charlie Smith [a pseudonym] is a co-founder of GreatFire.org and FreeWeibo.com and has been working to end online censorship in China since 2011. Smith and the team at GreatFire.org are now busy implementing and expanding collateral freedom in China—a strategy which mirrors blocked websites on cloud services that the Chinese authorities deem too valuable to block. They have unblocked ten websites, including China Digital Times, Google, BBC Chinese, and, most recently, Deutsche Welle. A list of everything that they have unblocked can be found on their Github page.
George Chen is an award-winning journalist and a 2014 Yale World Fellow. He is the author of two books, This is Hong Kong I Know (2014) and Foreign Banks in China (2011). He has written for the South China Morning Post, Reuters, Dow Jones, Foreign Policy, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, and Shanghai Observer, among other international and Chinese publications. Chen has covered China’s political and economic changes since 2002, when he started his media career at an official newspaper in his hometown, Shanghai.
Chen is currently managing editor for the SCMP.com International Edition and a columnist at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's premier English language newspaper. Global political and business leaders interviewed by Chen in recent years include Myanmar’s political leader Aung San Suu Kyi and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. His “Mr. Shangkong” column, about the two competing yet linked financial centers Shanghai and Hong Kong, has become an iconic weekly column for the SCMP, which he joined in 2012 after a seven-year career at the international news agency Reuters.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and English, Chen is a strong advocate for freedom of the press, which is also the research focus of his proposed doctoral thesis at the University of Hong Kong. Chen has been interviewed by the BBC, Al Jazeera, The New Yorker, Business Insider, Quartz, and other media outlets on China and Hong Kong affairs. He is one of the most followed Hong Kong social media users on both Twitter and Sina Weibo.
With Astrill and several other free and paid-subscription virtual private networks (VPNs) that make leaping China’s Great Firewall possible now harder to use themselves after government interference "gummed" them up, the world wide web just shrank a notch for 600 million Chinese web surfers. Or did it? Do average Chinese care about the wider, Western presentation of the Internet? Will they accept so limited a tool while living at home?
The N.B.A. will receive $500 million, with $200 million more expected through a revenue-sharing arrangement between the league and Tencent, a social media powerhouse.
