President Xi Jinping on Wednesday redefined the “principal contradiction” faced by Chinese people, signalling a shift in the country’s development focus for the years, if not decades, ahead from unbridled economic growth to better quality expansion and improved wealth distribution.
The Pakistani town of Gwadar was until recently filled with the dust-colored cinderblock houses of about 50,000 fishermen. Ringed by cliffs, desert, and the Arabian Sea, it was at the forgotten edge of the earth. Now it’s one centerpiece of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative, and the town has transformed as a result. Gwadar is experiencing a storm of construction: a brand-new container port, new hotels, and 1,800 miles of superhighway and high-speed railway to connect it to China’s landlocked western provinces. China and Pakistan aspire to turn Gwadar into a new Dubai, making it a city that will ultimately house 2 million people.
China’s ruling Communist Party will scrap the practice of secretive interrogations known as “shuanggui”, President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday, part of broader reforms of its anti-corruption architecture.
Mr Yu is worried that millions of workers the Chinese government plans to lay off from failing state owned companies will be “abandoned” like he says he was 15 years ago.
The importance of the Chinese Communist Party’s 19th party congress to the future of Xi Jinping’s leadership and the direction of China has paralyzed policy debates on many issues, including North Korea. The paralysis has persisted despite the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to wheedle greater Chinese cooperation to rein in North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs before they can strike the U.S. mainland.
When Xi Jinping strode out in the Great Hall of the People five years ago as China’s new leader, his tight smile barely hid the atmosphere of smoldering crisis.
Democracies have found it difficult to deal with the great dictatorships. So now with China. The first difficulty is to recognize just what we are up against, and to avoid wishful thinking.
In his first five years, Xi Jinping has reshaped the Chinese state so radically that he has taken the People’s Republic into the third phase in its historic march, after the ideological madness of Mao and the economic pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping and his followers. He inherited a state intent on economic advancement, and has turned it into one intent on political control.
Elizabeth M. Lynch is a legal services attorney in New York City and the founder of China Law & Policy. She was named a New York Law Journal “Rising Star” in 2015, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, and the George Washington International Law Review. From 2007 to 2009, Lynch was a research fellow at NYU Law School’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute, where she worked with Professor Jerome Cohen on criminal justice reform projects in China. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. in Chinese Studies and Political Science from the State University of New York at Albany. Before becoming a lawyer, Lynch spent one year as a Fulbright Scholar researching rule of law issues at Peking University in Beijing.
When the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party convenes in Beijing on Wednesday, the world will be served up a dazzling spectacle of power and procedure.
The presidium of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held its first meeting on Tuesday afternoon, approving a report on the examination of delegates’ qualifications by the delegate credentials committee.
