A potential partnership between the first ladies could go beyond forming a popular new image for the U.S.-China relationship. Obama and Peng have shown a mutual interest in areas of policy central to our shared future.
Though recognized and observed by groups and nations all over the world, in China itself, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre will pass without any public acknowledgement.
Complain as we might about life in China, the last thirty-four years or so haven’t been all bad: we have seen three decades of roughly ten percent GDP growth, a whole lot of people eating a whole lot better than they did, and impressive progress improving life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy rates, and more, not to mention a slew of prescient infrastructure investments in transportation and telecommunication networks.
In 1967, as the United States sank into war in the jungles of Vietnam and China descended into the cataclysm of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese soldiers secretly fighting alongside the North Vietnamese also battled swarms of malarial mosquitoes. Showing remarkable foresight, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong amassed a secret team of top scientists with one mission: find a cure for malaria.
At first glance, it isn’t an obvious pairing. Düsseldorf is the fashion and advertising capital of Germany. Wuxi is a fast-growing industrial city on China’s east coast, with probably more coal plants than catwalks. But a German environmental think-tank has linked the two together in an international exercise designed to encourage cities to pool experiences on cutting emissions and saving resources.
That a four-year-old factory in a fast-growing economy could be run in such a dangerous fashion is a story not of poverty but of legal disarray. Early on, Chinese were openly discussing corruption, safety standards, and the government’s likely response.
Many current top leaders served their political apprenticeship in the 1980s, when the boundaries between the permissible and the forbidden were not as stark and heavily policed as they are now.
An anti-China march in the Vietnamese capital on Sunday showed the domestic pressure the government faces when dealing with Beijing’s muscular approach to territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Beijing’s essentially unlimited financial resources allow the country to be a force in both the developed and developing world, one that threatens to obliterate the competitive edge of Western firms and kill jobs in Europe and America.
Phonemica, or xiangyinyuan, is an innovative project that documents China’s myriad dialects and languages, many of which are slowly disappearing due to state-sponsorship of Mandarin as the national language.
