With a meeting between Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Xi Jinping of China taking place in last month in Beijing, this represents that at least publicly, North Korea and China will continue to present somewhat of a united front in the face of America under Donald Trump...
Planned population controls by the Chinese government in its key cities are indicative of the priorities of the CCP when it comes to China’s future development. Namely, both Shanghai and Beijing put population caps into place last year, with Shanghai setting in place a limit of 25 million and Beijing setting in place a population cap of 23 million...
With the recent removal of term limits that a Chinese president can serve, possibly paving the way for Chinese president Xi Jinping to move towards lifetime rule, bluster by China against Taiwan has increased...
It has been an strange fact that, with the removal of term limits that a Chinese president can serve, the elevation of Chinese president Xi Jinping has been rapid enough that Xi has already been claimed to have reached level of deification by some. However, this has a very simple explanation...
Moves by China to upgrade benefits currently enjoyed by Taiwanese similar to those enjoyed by Chinese citizens, as a way of luring Taiwan into its fold, would be another attempt by China to divide and conquer Taiwan from within. It remains to be seen how successful these strategies prove to be. But there are already several cases in which one can see what the logical outcome of China treating Taiwanese citizens as they are Chinese citizens would be...
The recent proposal by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to remove term limits on the presidency of China from the current limit of two five-year terms has been read correctly as Xi Jinping making moves towards lifetime rule. With Xi emerging as the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping after he took power in 2013, it has been speculated in recent years whether Xi would move to remove these lifetime limits as he approached the end of his term...
The arrest of 24-year-old Maoist intellectual Zhang Yunfan, a graduate student at Peking University in philosophy, is nothing really surprising. Despite Maoists advocating for strengthened state powers to regulate the economy and perhaps seen themselves as a loyal opposition to the state, the flip side of this is that the state could still turn on them when it sees them as threats...
Donald Trump's recently concluded Asia trip was the site of much bizarre spectacle and pageantry, with Asia Pacific leaders going out of their way to tickle Trump’s ego. This illustrates that Asia Pacific leaders hope to keep Trump pacified through flattery, even when they could otherwise benefit from an American loss of face on the world stage...
Evaluations of Trump’s Asia trip remain ambiguous, with Trump’s unorthodox means of conducting diplomacy leading to difficulties evaluating whether his trip advanced or compromised American interests in the Asia Pacific. However, an early evaluation suggests that while no fundamental shift in the status quo of the Asia Pacific has yet occurred following Trump’s trip, China’s position has been strengthened due to the image that the irregularities of Trump’s actions present to the international world...
Renewed emphasis on Marxism after China’s 19th National Congress is not too surprising, seeing as China has never fully distanced itself from its purported claims to embrace Marxism as an ideology. Nevertheless, despite the fact that China may claim to be Marxist, China has long since embraced a free market economy while clinging to Marxism as a justification for a high degree of state involvement in the economy and the primacy of the state over political affairs...