"China does not want this to affect the overall situation, the central government has always maintained a relatively calm and restrained attitude because Sino-U.S. relations are important," said Zhao Kejing, a professor of international relations at China's elite Tsinghua University.
A 2010 survey of boarding school students in four of China’s poorest counties found hunger pangs, malnutrition and stunted growth appallingly common.
Some 72 percent of the more than 1,000 students questioned for the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF) survey said they felt grinding hunger while in class. And up to one-third said they went hungry every day.
In Beijing, people with knowledge of how China handled Mr. Snowden’s exit from Hong Kong were claiming a tactical victory for China, saying that the government had acted in China’s best interests, and in the long-term interests of its relationship with the United States.
China’s blueprint for economic reform is finally taking shape. The government has appointed a taskforce to draft the plans, ahead of the third plenary meeting of the 18th Central Committee. With the country’s economy at the crossroads, these plans are eagerly awaited.
Matt Schiavenza:
Hong Kong rose up as the essential gateway into Communist China over the second half of the twentieth century—a British-run laissez-faire playground whose bottom-line pragmatism proved lucrative for all, maintaining a fluid, delicate balance between East and West, socialism and capitalism, the ancient and the hypermodern, legitimate society and the underworld.
Edward Snowden evolved from a tourist to a fugitive to an icon, and, finally, an irritant. And, in the end, the governments with the power to decide his fate—Hong Kong and Beijing—faced a choice: the short-term pain of defying a U.S. request for cooperation, or the long-term anguish of sheltering a man whose biography had become a symbol in China and abroad.
Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, as a “counterrevolutionary” inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about Chinese society, both traditional and Communist. He ends his account by saying that “China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty.”
For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programmes ahead of planned leaks to the media. “My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” he told the Post.
On Monday, Chen accused Beijing of Spending billions of dollars annually to monitor dissidents and activists and out them in jail if they refused to stop their advocacies. "No other regimes in the world have feared or monitored their own people in such a way," Chen said.
