Philippine President Benigno Aquino is strengthening military ties with countries like the U.S. as it is embroiled in a territorial dispute with China over islands and shoals in the South China Sea.
The publication comes during a fraught period in Japan-China relations. Last week, Japan's Mitsui O.S.K. Lines paid $29 million for the release of a ship seized by China over a dispute that dates back to the 1930s.
Alibaba's eBay-like marketplace Taobao allows budding entrepreneurs to set up and run an online store, for free. The site has steven million sellers offering hundreds of millions of items.
Many Chinese buyers are switching their interest away from markets like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore amid fears that prices have soared to frothy levels in those cities.
The Balance of Power in the Pacific; China’s global footprint; and friendship with Russia
Anyone living in China doubtless has a sense of the unholy number of people who seem to be involved in the trash trade here, and who will ferret away everything from your cardboard boxes to plastic bottles faster than you can unpack them or consume their contents. And maybe you’ve seen the opposite end of the supply chain, in televised shots of cities like Guiyu which seem to resemble nothing so much as the inner circles of Dante’s inferno, upended and focused on ripping apart cellphones and other electronics with all demonic fury.
Jonathan Kaiman is the Beijing-based bureau chief of The Los Angeles Times. Previously, he wrote for The Guardian, covering China's culture, politics and environment. He moved to China on a Fulbright grant in 2009, and spent most of the year in rural Sichuan province recording traditional stories and songs. He got his start in journalism as a research intern at The New York Times' Beijing bureau. As a Guardian reporter, he wrote about Christian missionaries in Tibet, Uyghur tightrope walkers, a Mongolian shaman, cancer villages, the politics of pop music, and Edward Snowden. Kaiman has also filed stories from South Korea, Mongolia, India, Hong Kong and Canada for publications including the L.A. Times, Foreign Policy, and the Atlantic. He is a graduate of Vassar College.
Sam Crane is a professor in the political science department at Williams College, where he teaches contemporary Chinese politics and ancient Chinese philosophy. He is the author of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chinese Thought in Modern American Life.
The late Ambassador Wu Jianmin was Executive Vice Chairman of China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, a Senior Research Fellow of the Counselors’ office of the State Council of China, a Member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Committee of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, a Member and Vice President of the European Academy of Sciences, and Honorary President of the International Bureau of Exhibitions (BIE).
From 2003 to 2008, Wu served as President of China Foreign Affairs University, Executive Vice President of the China National Association for International Studies, Vice Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Spokesman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. He served as China’s Ambassador to France from 1998 to 2003, from 1996 to 1998 as Ambassador of China to the UN in Geneva, and as Ambassador of China to the Netherlands from 1994 to 1995. Before that, he was Director General of the Information Department and Spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Deputy Chief at China’s embassy in Belgium and its mission to the European Community in Brussels, and Counselor at China’s mission to the United Nations in New York.
From 2003 to 2007, Ambassador Wu served as President of the International Bureau of Expositions (BIE), making him the first Asian to take up the post. He graduated from the Department of French at Beijing Foreign Studies University and from 1965 to 1971 interpreted for Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai. In 1971, he became a member of China's first delegation to the United Nations. He was awarded by French President Jacques Chirac the honor of Grand Officier of la Légion d’Honneur in 2003.
Wu was killed in a car wreck on June 18, 2016, in Wuhan, China.
