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For U.S., Taiwan Vote Changes Calculus Over ‘One China’
Honor guards marched in the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei this week. The Taiwanese increasingly believe they live in a sovereign state, not a ‘renegade province’ of China. Photo: EPA/JEROME FAVRE By Andrew Browne, The Wall Street Journal, 19 January 2016 TAIPEI—No dogma is more important to Beijing than read more →
Interview with Steve Keen on China debt
By Valentin Schmid, Epoch Times | January 17, 2016 Steve Keen: China’s Stock Market Is an ‘Unbelievable Bubble’ The most famous unconventional economist talks about debt in China and why it’s a problem. It’s the debt, stupid. This is what professor Steve Keen of London’s Kingston University has been saying all along: Private debt is read more →
Editorial: Preventing a water war in Asia
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES – – Monday, January 18, 2016 Just when Asia was getting accustomed to the Chinese threat to the oceans of Southeast Asia, there’s another water worry for Asians. The government in Beijing controls the health of six major South and Southeastern Asian rivers, the heart of read more →
Tibet – Disneyland of Snows with Chinese Characteristics
[Lhasa : In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, phalanxes attend a grand ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region at the square of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, capital of southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2015. Schoolchildren waved read more →
European, US and Australian lawyers call for China to end rights crackdown
BEIJING – Leading human rights lawyers from Europe, North America and Australia have called on Chinese president Xi Jinping to end an unprecedented crackdown by his security forces that has seen hundreds of attorneys and their relatives intimidated, interrogated, detained and forcibly disappeared. A government offensive against China’s “weiquan” or read more →
Tsai Ing-wen elected Taiwan’s first female president
BBC, 17 January 2016 Tsai Ing-wen has been elected Taiwan’s first female president. Ms Tsai, 59, leads the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that wants independence from China. In her victory speech, she vowed to preserve the status quo in relations with China, adding Beijing must respect Taiwan’s democracy and both read more →
After vote, China tells Taiwan to abandon independence ‘hallucination’
BY JAMES POMFRET, MATTHEW MILLER AND BEN BLANCHARD, Reuters, 17 January 2016 TAIPEI/BEIJING – Taiwan should abandon its “hallucinations” about pushing for independence, as any moves toward it would be a “poison”, Chinese state-run media said after a landslide victory for the island’s independence-leaning opposition. Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic read more →
US Under Secretary arrives at Dharamshala; purpose of visit undisclosed
US Under Secretary Sarah Sewall at the Kangra airport along with Sikyong Lobsang Sangay and other delegates on Friday. (Shyam Sharma/HT Photo) United States (US) Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights Sarah Sewall arrived at Dharamshala on Friday. As a US special coordinator for Tibetan issues, Sewall read more →
Canada ‘like heaven’ for Tibetan refugee
Tsering Yangzom, a graduate of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, is a Tibetan refugee who has made Canada home. By: Debra Black Immigration Reporter, The Sta, Published on Sun Jan 10 2016 Somewhere, the Dalai Lama is smiling. He couldn’t help but be pleased read more →
China income inequality among world’s worst
By Gabriel Wildau and Tom Mitchell, Financial Times, 14 January 2016. Communist China has one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality, with the richest 1 per cent of households owning a third of the country’s wealth, a report from Peking University has found. The poorest 25 per cent of Chinese read more →
China’s pursuit of rights lawyers signals aggressive push against ‘subversion’
By Tom Phillips, The Guardian, 14 January 2016. Decision to charge human rights advocates with a crime that could lead to life in prison is a major escalation in war on Communist party’s perceived foes. That some of China’s most revered human rights lawyers have spent the last six months read more →
The emperor’s mighty brother
Caterpillar fungus The emperor’s mighty brother Demand for an aphrodisiac has brought unprecedented wealth to rural Tibet—and trouble in its wake The Economist / Dec 19th 2015 | YUSHU, QINGHAI PROVINCE | From the print edition BY THE middle of May, the snowline in Yushu prefecture has retreated to the peaks read more →
Connectivity Wars – Weaponising Interdependence
by Mark Leonard, ECFR.EU When Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet in November 2015, the image of the falling plane went viral. Calls for revenge exploded across the Russian media and internet. Protesters hurled stones and eggs at the Turkish embassy in Moscow. And the high-profile host of Russia’s read more →
Trouble in Tibet
A group of young Tibetan monks huddles on a degraded pasture on the Tibetan Plateau. Kevin Frayer/Getty By Jane Qiu, 13 January 2016, Nature.Com In the northern reaches of the Tibetan Plateau, dozens of yaks graze on grasslands that look like a threadbare carpet. The pasture has been munched down read more →
Why Are Tibetans Setting Themselves on Fire?
By Tsering Woeser, NYR Daily, 11 January 2016 February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the read more →