An image from a ‘population-density system,’ from a 2019 procurement notice issued by the Shishan township Comprehensive Management, Petitioning, and Stability Maintenance Office in Guangdong province.
Citing national security concerns, the Trump administration announced September 18 that it was banning both TikTok and WeChat from mobile app stores starting Sunday, with further usage bans to come. While that date came and went without any impact on the apps’ accessibility in the U.S.
Abby Seiff is a ChinaFile Editorial Fellow. She is an award-winning editor and journalist with nearly a decade of international experience, primarily in Southeast Asia. Her writing and photography have appeared in Newsweek, Time, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera, and Pacific Standard, among other publications. She served as an editor for several years at The Cambodia Daily and The Phnom Penh Post, before going on to work at UCANews, Devex, and Asia Society.
In recent years, she has covered the Hong Kong protests, Chinese-state hacking of foreign elections, and the 709 crackdown. Her work has garnered several awards and grants, including an International Reporting Project fellowship, a Logan Nonfiction fellowship, and a residency at Yaddo. She is currently writing a book about Cambodia’s imperiled Tonle Sap lake and the fate of the millions who live off its fisheries.
Fergus Ryan is an Analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre. He holds an M.A. in International Studies from the University of Technology Sydney and a B.A. in Chinese and Philosophy from the University of Sydney. He was a China correspondent for the News Corp. publication China Spectator as well as for China Film Insider. Ryan has worked in media, communications, and marketing roles in China and Australia as well as in business development for the Chinese actress Li Bingbing. His research interests include Chinese social media, censorship, the Great Firewall, cyber sovereignty, and Chinese tech companies.
Meeting via video conference on Monday, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, held a summit with European Council President Charles Michel, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Slimmed down in format thanks to the COVID pandemic and strained in spirit as a result of a host of growing frictions, the digital conclave was a far cry from what was envisioned for the meeting just months ago. What were the meeting’s most significant outcomes and what do they portend for relations between Europe and China going forward?
Last fall, as China’s lawmakers neared finalizing the country’s first-ever Civil Code, they opened to public comment its draft chapters on marriage and other areas of law. A newly formed coalition of LGBTQ organizations advocating for gay marriage called Ai Cheng Jia (“Love Makes Family”) saw an opportunity. They could use the official comments process—which typically only receives anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand submissions—to flood policymakers with calls for marriage equality.
Julia Voo was Research Director for China Cyber Policy at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where she led a Track II Dialogue between the U.S. and China on cybersecurity between 2018-2020. Before Harvard, Julia lived in Beijing for seven years with stints at the EU Delegation to China, Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, and British Embassy, and she has spent time at the UK’s Cabinet Office.
Voo is currently a Cyber Fellow at Belfer, where she leads the team behind Belfer’s National Cyber Power Index (NCPI). The NCPI is the first index to systematically measure comprehensive cyber power for 30 countries. Voo has affiliations with the Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford), the Hague Program for Cyber Norms (Leiden), and the China-Africa Research Initiative (Johns Hopkins).
Her research examines geotech strategy including the Digital Silk Road, industrial policy, and technical standards for strategic technologies. Voo’s research and commentary appears in popular media outlets including BBC World News, The Financial Times, Wired, and Politico China.
Critics of the last four decades of China policy have incorrectly and simplistically labeled diplomacy a failure because the People’s Republic did not become a liberal democracy. That was never the goal or an achievable objective of U.S. policy. The goal was to shape Chinese policy to align more with U.S. objectives: a more open society, reduced overseas disruptive behavior, increasingly transparent business operations.
