A sleepy tourist town on the shores of Siberia’s Lake Baikal has become an unlikely lightning rod among Russian nationalists after Chinese investors bought up properties on the town’s lakefront.
Huang Yong Ping: ‘Theater of the World,’ 1993. Wood and metal structure with warming lamps, electric cable, insects (spiders, scorpions, crickets, cockroaches, black beetles, stick insects, centipedes), lizards, toads, and snakes, 150 x 270 x 160 cm.
Freelance journalist William Davison joins Eric and Cobus to discuss his reporting from the Hawassa Industrial Park in Ethiopia, which is the latest high-stakes gamble taken by a number of African countries to lure Chinese manufacturers. Officials spent $250 million to build this new park in the hope that it will attract foreign manufacturers and create some 200,000 badly needed jobs for the region’s bulging youth population. So far, 18 companies, including apparel giant PVH, the U.S. owner of brands such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, have set up shop in the Hawassa Industrial Park.
Installation view: ‘Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,’ Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 6, 2017-January 7, 2018.
A year after the Foreign NGO Law’s promulgation, Betram Lang of Goethe University asks why European civil society seems relatively quiescent about the new legal regime. The answer may lie in the wide range of interests belied by the singular “European” label, and in some groups’ use of less formal exchange mechanisms to continue work in China. Read the full analysis here.
Worries about the future of civil society organizations in China are limited to only a handful of European countries. Others put their faith in established informal ties or have subscribed to Chinese understandings of “people-to-people exchanges,” which are unlikely to be affected by restrictions on non-governmental organizations.
Bertram Lang is a research associate at Goethe University Frankfurt. His academic interest includes China’s non-profit sector, EU-China relations, and the politics of anti-corruption. Lang has also worked as an advisor to various international organizations on Global China affairs. He previously worked as an analyst in the European China Policy Unit of the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
His recent publications include an analysis of China’s impact on international anti-corruption norms and a study on the implementation of China’s social credit system. His comments have appeared in The New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among other publications.
Lang studied Political Science and Chinese Studies in Freiburg (Germany), Nanjing (China), and Aix-en-Provence (France). He also holds a Master’s degree in EU International Relations from the College of Europe in Bruges. His professional career included stints at the Robert Bosch Stiftung in Stuttgart, the European Parliament in Brussels, and the Delegation of the European Union in Beijing.
