Why Korean Reunification is in China’s Strategic National Interest

Jamie Metzl

North Korea’s July 4 launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile has highlighted once again both the extent to which Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program and aggressive behavior is destabilizing the Asia Pacific region and the relative impotence of efforts to date designed to respond. Although North Korean nuclear weapons seem primarily designed to ensure regime survival, these weapons will, once fully deliverable, provide Pyongyang with the almost unlimited ability to blackmail its... Read full story>>

Should the U.S. Play Hardball with China on Trade?

A ChinaFile Conversation

Tom Hoffecker, Duncan Innes-Ker & more via ChinaFile Conversation

Last week, United States President Donald Trump suggested that he is considering leveraging tariffs on Chinese steel imports. Trump’s aggressive posture has left diplomatic experts uneasy amid an already divided U.S. diplomatic house in Beijing, and was met with criticism by trade experts. Should the U.S. impose steel tariffs in an attempt to rebalance an asymmetric trade relationship? What kind of knock-on effects might this have on the widening gap between Chinese-bound U.S. investment and U... Read full story>>

Guo Wengui: The Extraordinary Tale of a Chinese Billionaire Turned Dissident

A Sinica Podast

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more

The life and times of Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui reads much like an epic play, so it is fitting that we have included with this podcast a dramatis personæ to explain the many characters in Guo’s story. Scroll to the bottom, below the recommendations, to follow along with them in order of appearance.New York Times journalists Mike Forsythe and Alexandra Stevenson have spent over a dozen hours with the turbulent tycoon at the New York City penthouse overlooking Central Park where he resides... Read full story>>

China’s Astounding Religious Revival

Roderick MacFarquhar via New York Review of Books

If there were just one Chinese in the world, he could be the lonely sage contemplating life and nature whom we come across on the misty mountains of Chinese scrolls. If there were two Chinese in the world, a man and a woman, lo, the family system is born. And if there were three Chinese, they would form a tight-knit, hierarchically organized bureaucracy.But how many Chinese would there have to be to generate a religion? It could be just one—that Daoist sage in the mountains—but in reality it... Read full story>>

Jerome A. Cohen on Human Rights and Law in China

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more via Sinica Podcast

Professor Jerome A. Cohen began studying the law of what was then called “Red China” in the early 1960s, at a time when the country was closed off, little understood, and much maligned in the West.Legal institutions were just developing at that time and, under the rule of Mao Zedong, were liable to dramatically change every three to seven years, Jerry says. After 12 years of persistence, he was finally able to visit the elusive country, and quickly became a pioneering Western scholar of China’s... Read full story>>

Liu Xiaobo’s Three Refusals: No Enemies, No Hatred, No Lies

An Excerpt from ‘Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century’

Orville Schell & John Delury

In the spring of 1989, Liu Xiaobo was a thirty-four-year-old professor of literature and philosophy at Beijing Normal University with a keen interest in political ideas, who when demonstrations broke out, quickly became a habitué of Tiananmen Square. Having written a doctoral thesis on the topic of aesthetics and human freedom, he was a prolific if acidic writer, a loner and iconoclast who believed that the most worthy role of intellectuals was to “enunciate thoughts that are ahead of their... Read full story>>

The Chinese Think Liu Xiaobo Was Asking For It

Victim-Blaming Is Self-Protective in a Country Where the Government Could Crush You at Any Moment

James Palmer via Foreign Policy

Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident writer, is dying of liver cancer. He’s been in prison since 2009, his “crime” being the publication of a charter calling for political reform. But he’s not a hero to his countrymen. Most Chinese have only vaguely heard of Liu if they’re aware of him at all; those who know about him, in my experience, speak of him with distaste. “He should be grateful that the government is giving him medical care for free!” one acquaintance posted... Read full story>>