Hong Kong’s democracy protests are often said to be futile because the city is no longer China’s golden goose, protected from Beijing’s wrath by its economic importance. But Monday’s big news shows that things aren’t so simple: The opening of a “through train” between the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges confirms that Hong Kong remains China’s financial capital.
“This purchase marks the first time for any Chinese-made planes to enter an advanced market, and the U.S. has the highest standards, so this testifies to the achievement of Chinese aircraft manufacturing,” said Li Xianzhe of Avicopter to the South China Morning Post.
Visa and MasterCard executives eager to expand in China were thrilled recently when Premier Li Keqiang seemed to suggest that a door would open to them for bank card yuan business in the country.
But they had read Li wrong: The premier's statement in late October did not signal an opening to overseas bank card firms. Instead, it signaled tougher times.
Amnesty International and the Omega Research Foundation recently published a new report that alleges China is selling hundreds of millions of dollars in so-called "torture tools" to African governments. Despite mounting evidence these devices are being used to commit severe human rights abuses, little is being done to regulate or limit their sale. Patrick Wilcken is a security trade and human rights researcher at Amnesty and a co-author of the report.
Patrick Wilcken is a Brazil specialist and human rights activist who currently works at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London. He has over a decade of experience working on a wide range of human rights issues across Brazil. His research interests include policy developments in the criminal justice system, indigenous rights and housing policy. He has extensive field experience conducting research in indigenous reservations, the prison system, gang-dominated favelas, urban squats, cane plantations and areas of rural conflict. He has lobbied in Brasilia and at the UN, and has represented Amnesty in the media both in Brazil and internationally.
He is the author of two acclaimed non-fiction books: Empire Adrift: the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro 1808-21 (Bloomberg, 2005) and Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory (Penguin Press, 2010). Both books were published to great acclaim in the UK and the US, and have subsequently appeared in translation in Europe, South America and Asia. He has also authored a substantial body of academic and non-academic articles for a range of different publications.
The news from Beijing this week that the U.S. and China are committing to ambitious goals on climate change is, we think, monumental. No two countries are more important to tackling the problem than the largest carbon emitter over the past two centuries, the U.S., and the largest current emitter, China. While many observers are focusing on the ramifications of the announcement for upcoming international negotiations, we believe that the announcement also has potentially profound domestic effects for both countries.
Ann Carson is the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law, and the inaugural Faculty Director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law. She is the co-author (with Daniel Farber and Jody Freeman) of a leading casebook, Cases and Materials on Environmental Law (8th ed.). Carlson is also a frequent commentator and speaker on environmental issues, particularly on climate change, and she blogs at Legal Planet.
Carlson received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1989 and her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982.
China's pathologically secretive defense industry normally shows nothing official of its weapons programs to anyone, which makes the biennial Zhuhai expo the only chance to see what its weapons makers have been up to.
The meeting risks antagonizing Beijing, which bristles at perceptions that its rise in the region is being challenged, but also comes as the U.S. and Japan are working to repair ties with China.
The thorn in the side of relations is Japan’s Senkaku islands, which China claims and calls the Diaoyus. Chinese aircraft and coastguard vessels have greatly raised tensions from 2012 onwards, by making incursions around the Senkakus.
