In light of the third anniversary of the adoption of the Foreign NGO Law, the Tianjin Municipality PSB Foreign NGO Management Office paid visits to local government agencies, universities, and foreign NGOs that are based in China as part of a week-long effort to further deepen the understanding and public awareness of the law.
Michael DeGolyer is a Research Fellow at Civic Exchange, Hong Kong’s only independent public policy think tank. He was the Director of the Hong Kong Transition Project during its 30-year history, from 1989 to 2018. The project tracked the Hong Kong people’s transition from British subjects to Chinese citizens. Over 120 surveys and survey reports were produced by the project. Many of these reports will be on the newly launched Hong Kong-focused Public Policy Research Platform.
DeGolyer was a Professor of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University and Director of the university’s M.A. in Public Administration Programme until 2015. As Director of the M.A. in Public Administration Programme, he sought and got approved from the Beijing side, but not the Hong Kong Baptist University side due to repercussions from Occupy Central, for an innovative, confidence-building exchange program bringing entry and mid-level mainland civil servants to Hong Kong to study for up to one year and sending Hong Kong public administration students on extended study tours to Beijing. He also wrote for The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Hong Kong-Macau economic and political risk reports from 1998 to 2008. He was President of the Hong Kong Political Science Association, V.P. of the Hong Kong Public Administration Association, was twice elected by Higher Education Functional Constituency voters to the Chief Executive Election Committee, and was thus one of 1,200 people in Hong Kong empowered to vote for the Chief Executive.
Liu Xia, widow of Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and died while in Chinese custody in 2017, has opened up to the public for the first time since she began a life of exile in Germany nearly a year ago. On May 4, in a dialogue with the well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, she spoke candidly of exile, memory, history, and art. The event accompanied the opening of an exhibition of her artistic photographs featuring her “Ugly Babies” and “Silk” series at the Galerie Peter Sillem in Frankfurt. I served as moderator and interpreter. The transcript below has been edited, with permission of the participants.
Robert Delaney is the South China Morning Post’s North America Bureau Chief. He has been covering China and U.S.-China relations since 1995. His debut novel, The Wounded Muse, published in 2018 by Canada’s Mosaic Press, is based on actual events that played out during his time in China.
(From left to right) Ai Weiwei, Perry Link, and Liu Xia at an event in Frankfurt, Germany, May 4, 2019.
When Chinese law professor Xu Zhangrun began publishing articles last year criticizing the government’s turn toward a harsher variety of authoritarianism, it seemed inevitable that he would be swiftly silenced. But then, remarkably, dozens of prominent citizens began speaking up. Some signed a petition, others wrote essays and poems in Xu’s support, and one wrote a song. To anyone familiar with Chinese politics, the reference was clear: the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown on the Tiananmen protests. The 30th Tiananmen anniversary is complemented by several other important dates, making 2019 the most sensitive year in a generation. Anyone with any political sense knows that this convergence of dates makes 2019 the year to keep quiet. And yet people continue to speak up. Why?
Siqi Tu is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She earned a B.A. degree in Sociology from Fudan University (China) and a M.A. degree in Sociology from Columbia University. Her work focuses on the areas of urban sociology, immigration, education, elites, and contemporary Chinese societies.
Tu was born and raised in Shanghai, China and moved to New York City in 2012. She developed her interest in immigration and urban neighborhoods as a keen observer of diverse communities in different metropolitan areas. Her dissertation, “Destination Diploma: How Chinese Upper-Middle Class Families ‘Outsource’ Secondary Education to the United States,” investigates why and how Chinese upper-middle-class families make decisions to send their children to the Unites States to attend private high schools, some as young as 14 years of age, and it analyzes the actual lived experiences of the students of this “parachute generation.” She has taught Sociology at Brooklyn College since 2014 and is currently a Graduate Fellow at Futures Initiative, which advocates greater equity and innovation in higher education at every level of the university.
Rudra Chaudhuri is the Director of Carnegie India. His primary research focuses on the diplomatic history of South Asia and contemporary security issues. He is currently writing a book on the global history of the Indian Emergency, 1975-1977. At present, he is also heading a major research project that involves mapping and analyzing violent incidents and infrastructural development on and across India’s borders.
He is the author of Forged in Crisis: India and the United States Since 1947 (published in the U.K. by Hurst, in 2013, and in the U.S. and South Asia by Oxford University Press and Harper Collins, respectively, in 2014). His research has been published in scholarly journals such as International History Review, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Journal of Strategic Studies, International Affairs, the RUSI Journal, Defense Studies, and other academic and policy-focused journals. He is an occasional commentator in the media.
He is a senior lecturer at the Department of War Studies and the India Institute at King’s College London (currently on research leave). In addition, he is the Founding Director of the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) Diplomatic Academy for South Asia. He is also a Visiting Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University, New Delhi. He previously taught at the U.K. Joint Services Command and Staff College. He holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from King’s College London.
Srinath Raghavan is a Senior Fellow at Carnegie India. He is also a Professor of International Relations and History at Ashoka University. His primary research focus is on the contemporary and historical aspects of India’s foreign and security policies.
Raghavan has written a number of books spanning international relations, strategic studies, and modern South Asian history. He has authored War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years (2010) and 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013) and co-authored Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century (2013), India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-45 (2016), and, most recently, The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia (2018).
In addition to writing several notable books, he has also edited Imperialists, Nationalists, Democrats: The Collected Essays of Sarvepalli Gopal (2013) and co-edited (with David Malone and C. Raja Mohan) The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy (2015).
His work has also been published in scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Strategic Studies, Asian Affairs, and India Review, among other academic and policy-focused journals. He is a regular commentator in the media, and currently writes for The Print. His work has appeared in leading Indian publications.
He was awarded the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for his outstanding contribution to Strategic Studies in 2011 and the prestigious Infosys Prize (Social Sciences) in 2015.
Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. He was also a Senior Research Fellow at the India Institute at King’s College London and has taught at Defense Studies Department at King’s College London. He has been a member of the National Security Advisory Board, and was Chief Editor of the Kargil War History for the Indian Ministry of Defense. Prior to entering academia, he spent six years as an infantry officer in the Indian army.
London Publishing Partnership: Few people could tell you what happened on December 11, 2001, yet China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) will define the geopolitics of the 21st century. What were Western leaders thinking at the time?
This book tells the story of the most successful trading nation of the early 21st century. It looks at how the Chinese Communist Party has retained and cemented its monopoly of political power, producing unimagined riches for the political elite. It is the most extraordinary economic success story of our time, and it has reshaped the geopolitics not just of Asia but of the world. As China has come to dominate global manufacturing, its power and influence has grown. This economic power is being translated into political power, and the West now has a global rival that is politically antithetical to liberal values.
Meanwhile, economic liberalism has lost its moral foundation, in part because economic outcomes are not perceived to be the result of fair competition. The weaknesses of the West’s democratic model are being laid bare as a lack of wage growth coupled with a policy of inflation targeting by Western central banks has led to falling real incomes for the many, and rising asset prices that have benefited the few.
In order to have a fighting chance of protecting the freedoms of liberal democracies, it is of the utmost importance that we understand how the policy of indulgent engagement with China has affected Western society in recent years. Only then will the West be able to change direction for the better, and row back from the harmful consequences of China’s accession to the WTO.
