Tag: China

China’s Belt and Road: Implications for the United States

August 10, 2021

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy undertaking and the world’s largest infrastructure program, poses a significant challenge to U.S. economic, political, climate change, security, and global health interests. Since BRI’s launch in 2013, Chinese banks and companies have financed and built everything from power plants, railways, highways, and ports to telecommunications infrastructure, fiber-optic cables, and smart cities around the world. If implemented sustainably and responsibly, BRI has the potential to meet long-standing developing country needs and spur global economic growth. To date, however, the risks for both the United States and recipient countries raised by BRI’s implementation considerably outweigh its benefits.

https://www.cfr.org/report/chinas-belt-and-road-implications-for-the-united-states/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tf-bri&utm_source=tf-announcement

What 100 contracts reveal about China’s development lending ($)

August 10, 2021

Loans are not obviously predatory; secrecy is sometimes a condition

China insists it is helping poor countries follow in its own debt-financed footsteps, offering the kind of patient capital other lenders are now too wary to provide. China’s critics instead accuse it of drenching countries in red ink, then grabbing strategic assets, such as ports or mines, as collateral when a country defaults.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/03/31/what-100-contracts-reveal-about-chinas-development-lending

What the West Gets Wrong About China

August 10, 2021

Why do leaders in the West persist in getting China so wrong? In our work we have come to see that people in both business and politics often cling to three widely shared but essentially false assumptions about modern China. As we’ll argue in the following pages, these assumptions reflect gaps in their knowledge about China’s history, culture, and language that encourage them to draw persuasive but deeply flawed analogies between China and other countries.

https://bg.hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china#

The Roots of Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang ($)

March 28, 2021

China’s actions against the Uyghur people over the last four years recall the cultural genocides carried out by other settler colonial powers in previous eras. Much like indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australasia, Uyghurs have faced mass incarceration and internment, the destruction of cultural sites and symbols, displacement, family separation, and forced assimilation. Beijing’s recent policies in Xinjiang represent the culmination of a long and gradual colonization of the Uyghur homeland.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-02-10/roots-cultural-genocide-xinjiang

 

China Has Chosen Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang—For Now

Some members of the Uighur community say the abuse goes further. They allege that China is committing a cultural genocide. Cultural genocide means the elimination of a group’s identity, through measures such as forcibly transferring children away from their families, restricting the use of a national language, banning cultural activities, or destroying schools, religious institutions, or memory sites. Unlike “physical” genocide, it doesn’t have to be violent. Uighur activists point to the forced separation of families, the targeting of scholars and other community leaders for detention and “reeducation,” the bans on Uighur language instruction in schools, the razing of mosques, and the onerous restrictions on signifiers of cultural identity such as hair, dress, and baby names as evidence that China is trying to eradicate the Uighur identity.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/19/china-has-chosen-cultural-genocide-in-xinjiang-for-now/

“Genocide” is the wrong word for the horrors of Xinjiang ($)

February 12, 2021

To confront evil, the first step is to describe it accurately

It accomplishes nothing to exaggerate the Communist Party’s crimes in Xinjiang. Countless true stories of families torn apart and Uyghurs living in terror appal any humane listener. When ordinary Han Chinese hear them, as a few did on Clubhouse, a new social-media platform, which China has rushed to block, they are horrified (see article). By contrast, if America makes what sound like baseless allegations of mass killing, patriotic Chinese will be more likely to believe their government’s line, that Westerners lie about Xinjiang to tarnish a rising power.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/02/13/genocide-is-the-wrong-word-for-the-horrors-of-xinjiang

The Attack Of The Civilization-State

February 10, 2021

 

As a civilization-state, China is organized around culture rather than politics. Linked to a civilization, the state has the paramount task of protecting a specific cultural tradition. Its reach encompasses all the regions where that culture is dominant.

The importance of this concept became more obvious to me in India during a conversation with Ram Madhav, the general secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. After a conference in Delhi, he explained: “From now on, Asia will rule the world, and that changes everything because in Asia, we have civilizations rather than nations.”

The Attack Of The Civilization-State

The end of Xi Jinping’s Taiwan dream

January 14, 2020

Tsai capitalized on growing disquiet in Taiwan over China’s approach to Hong Kong, where pro-democracy protesters have agitated for months against what they view as Beijing’s steady assault on political freedoms. For Xi, the pitch for unification has hinged on Taiwan adopting a framework similar to Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model — where integration with the mainland would, in theory, not jeopardize civil liberties and democratic rights.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/14/end-xi-jinpings-taiwan-dream/?utm_campaign=todays_worldview&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=Newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1

Life Along Pakistan’s Mountain Highway Where China Is Investing Billions Of Dollars

December 31, 2019

Great summary of a specific place affected by new infrastructure, the hopes and realities.

Locals are making money from tourism and are buying more yaks, Abbas says. This year, he began with 500 and sold all but 32. “People like it because they don’t eat anything other than grass,” he says, sounding more like a hipster butcher than a grime-streaked 23-year-old shepherd. Before the road was fixed, he was selling barely 15 a year, and was surviving on chai and bread.

The bustle is apparent in the nearby border town of Sost, where cargo trucks come from across Pakistan to collect Chinese imports processed at the local dry port. Dozens of men sit outside, waiting for dollar-a-day jobs unloading boxes. Mohammad Iqbal, a 29-year-old customs official, says that when he was growing up, “there was only one shop, only one hotel.”

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/14/787220664/life-along-pakistans-mountain-highway-where-china-is-investing-billions-of-dolla