In my series of interviews with Chinese intellectuals, there is an empty chair for Ilham Tohti, the economist and Uighur activist. It’s not that I hadn’t heard of him or hadn’t been in China long enough to have met him before he was arrested earlier this year. I had, but foolishly had put off pursuing a meeting, thinking that of all the people who might be snapped up by the authorities, he was the least likely.
China's government has draped a darker shroud over Internet communications in recent weeks, a situation that has made it more difficult for Google and its customers to do business.
Chinese dissidents are constantly subject to all sorts of harassment, including a vicious online smear campaign.
Publicly, China's engagement in Africa is purportedly based on “mutual benefit” or, as Chinese officials like to phrase it “win win.” Behind the scenes, though, it's a little more complicated. Many of those multibillion-dollar natural resource-for-infrastructure deals have been arranged by mysterious middlemen like Sam Pa and his Hong Kong-based Queensway Group.
Tom Burgis is a London-based Investigations Correspondent for the Financial Times. He has covered Africa for the Financial Times for over six years, in particular the natural resource industries and the corruption and conflict that often accompany them. He was a correspondent in Johannesburg from 2008-2009 and west Africa correspondent, based in Lagos, from 2009-2011. Before joining the FT, he worked in South America and as a London-based freelancer covering, among other things, the anti-globalization movement.
[Updated March 18, 2015] The essay that follows was written by Zeng Jinyan, whose former partner, Hu Jia, has been prominently involved in activism around environmental issues, AIDS, and human rights in China over the past decade and a half and is a winner of the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. From 2008 to 2011, he served a three and a half year prison sentence for inciting state subversion. Since his release, he has lived under varying degrees of surveillance and house arrest in his apartment in Beijing.
Barbara A. Finamore is Senior Attorney and Asia Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Finamore founded NRDC’s China Program, which promotes innovative policy development, capacity building, and market transformation in China with a focus on climate, clean energy, environmental protection, and urban solutions. Finamore has had over 30 years of experience in environmental law and energy policy, with a focus on China for over two decades. She is also the co-founder and President of the China-U.S. Energy Efficiency Alliance, a nonprofit organization and public-private partnership that works with China to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency.
Angel Hsu, PhD is an Assistant Professor at Yale-National University of Singapore College and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She is Director of the Environmental Performance Index, released biennially by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. She was a 2010-2011 Fulbright Scholar to China and has testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on China's environmental policy. Her work has been cited and published in major media, including The Economist and The New York Times. She holds a Ph.D. in Forestry and Environmental Studies from Yale University.
Climate Week at the United Nations General Assembly is upon us and we asked a group of experts to bring us up-to-date about the areas where progress on climate change looks most possible for China, now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
In early August, Greenpeace China’s forest campaigner Wu Hao wrote a piece in the environmental section of the newspaper Southern Weekly about China’s astonishing rate of deforestation. He posted dramatic before and after satellite images of forests cleared in Zhejiang province, in southeastern China.
