Viewpoint
07.11.13
China at the Tipping Point?
What will be the future of China’s authoritarian political system?Many predicted that China’s rapid development over the past several decades would inevitably lead to gradual liberalization. Economic growth was expected to generate a cascade of...
Viewpoint
07.10.13
How the Snowden Affair Might End Up Helping U.S.-China Relations
The reason why both Americans and Chinese have become so nostalgic for the great Nixon/Kissinger-Mao Zedong/Zhou Enlai breakthrough in 1972 is because that was the last time that Sino-U.S. relations experienced a dramatic breakthrough. Now, most...
Viewpoint
06.05.13
A Re-Opening to China?
Five months into his second term, President Obama is about to undertake the most important diplomatic initiative of his presidency: an effort to reshape the relationship with China. With little fanfare thus far but considerable boldness on both...
Viewpoint
05.13.13
Maoism: The Most Severe Threat to China
Ma 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...
Viewpoint
04.26.13
Sino-American Relations: Amour or Les Miserables?
Winston 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...
Viewpoint
04.05.13
Christopher Hill on North Korea’s Provocations
The 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...
Viewpoint
04.04.13
‘Hi! I’m Fang!’ The Man Who Changed China
In 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”)...
Viewpoint
03.19.13
For Many in China, the One Child Policy is Already Irrelevant
Before 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...
Viewpoint
02.25.13
Xi Jinping Should Expand Deng Xiaoping’s Reforms
A month after the conclusion of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 18th National Congress, the new Secretary General of the CCP and Central Military Commission, comrade Xi Jinping, left Beijing to visit Shenzhen, the first foothold of China’s...
Viewpoint
02.11.13A Beginning for China’s Battered Women
Like 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...
Viewpoint
01.24.13
China at the Tipping Point?
Of 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...
Viewpoint
01.15.13
Will Xi Jinping Differ from His Predecessors?
As 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...
Viewpoint
01.13.13
Is Xi Jinping a Reformer? It’s Much Too Early to Tell
Last 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...
Viewpoint
11.15.12
Age of China’s New Leaders May Have Been Key to Their Selection
Earlier 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...
Viewpoint
11.14.12
The Future of Legal Reform
Carl 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,...
Viewpoint
11.14.12
Change in Historical Context
China’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...
Viewpoint
11.14.12
Are You Happier Than You Were Ten Years Ago?
“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...
Viewpoint
11.13.12
China’s Next Leaders: A Guide to What’s at Stake
Just 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...
Viewpoint
11.09.12
Pragmatism and Patience
Hamid 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...
Viewpoint
11.08.12
Who is Xi Jinping?
In 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...
Viewpoint
11.07.12
Peering Inside the ‘Black Box’
Just hours after the United States voted for its next president, China, too, is preparing for a leadership change—although much less is known about that process, which begins Thursday with the start of the 18th National Congress of the Communist...
Viewpoint
11.05.12
The Big Enterprise
In 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...
Viewpoint
10.29.12
Hollywood Film Summit Draws Chinese Movie Moguls
LOS ANGELES—Hollywood and Chinese movie makers and industry hangers-on will gather Tuesday at the third annual Asia Society U.S.-China Film Summit on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles.At a gala dinner Tuesday night, organizers...
Media
10.26.12
Myanmar Envy
Chinese netizens’ reactions to tentative democratic reforms in neighboring Myanmar, including to the recent repeal of censorship rules for private publishers by the Southeast Asian nation’s reformist government, reflect just how closely it’s...
Viewpoint
06.11.12
Dirty Air and Succession Jitters Clouding Beijing’s Judgment
Last 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...
Viewpoint
05.30.12
The Sweet and the Sour in China-U.S. Relations
At 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...
Viewpoint
05.20.12
Chen Guangcheng: A Hopeful Breakthrough?
The 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...
Viewpoint
12.14.92
China Plays the Market
from Nation
With the Chinese stock market in turmoil earlier this month, Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, wrote about the dramatic crash for The Guardian: “Why China’s Stock Market Bubble Was Always Bound To Burst.”...