The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam

By Ian Johnson on November 23, 2018

Last month, I spent several days at the Forbidden City, the gargantuan palace in the middle of Beijing where China’s emperors ruled the land for nearly five hundred years. I was there to attend a conference on religion and power in imperial China, but my thoughts were drawn to more contemporary concerns: the plight of the Uighurs in China’s far western province of Xinjiang, including re-education camps aimed at breaking their faith in Islam.

Brian Hioe

on November 21, 2018

Brian Hioe is one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan founded in the wake of the 2014 Sunflower Movement. He was a Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018 and has an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

Lev Nachman

on November 21, 2018

Lev Nachman is an Assistant Professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His work focuses on political participation and protest in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and he frequently comments on cross-strait relations and Taiwanese politics.

The Promise and Peril of Chinese Tech Investment in Africa

A China in Africa Podcast

By Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more on November 21, 2018

In this week's show, we bring you two perspectives on the promise and peril of increased Chinese technology investment in Africa.

Harriet Kariuki is an emerging markets analyst in Kenya where she surveys the digital landscape and local start-up scene to identify investment opportunities for foreign companies, including many from China. Harriet also writes extensively on China-Africa tech issues on LinkedIn, where she discusses both the promise and peril of Chinese technology investment on the continent.

Cui Liru

on November 20, 2018

Professor Liru Cui is the former President of and now a Senior Advisor to CICIR, a think-tank in China known for its comprehensive studies on current international affairs and prominent role in providing consulting services to the Chinese government.

Cui is a member of the Committee of Foreign Affairs of the Chinese Peoples’ Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and also serves as a member of the Foreign Policy Consulting Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is Vice President of China National Association for International Studies (CNAIS) and serves as Senior Adviser to multiple institutions for the study of national security and foreign relations. Cui supervises the Doctoral Program of study at CICIR and holds the post of professor with three universities in China, concurrently. As a senior researcher, his specialties cover U.S. foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, international security issues, and Chinese foreign policy.

Has the World Lost Sight of Tibet?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Gerald Roche, Lhadon Tethong & more on November 20, 2018

Since the incarceration of roughly a million Uighurs in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang over the last year, the situation in Tibet has gotten relatively less coverage in Western media. What is the current situation for human rights, political openness or repressiveness, and economic development in Tibet? And how has the attention paid to the situation in Xinjiang helped or hurt the situation in Tibet?

What Chinese Charities Are Facing, in One Easy Chart

on November 19, 2018

Earlier this year, the China-based organization NGOCN released the results of a survey to determine how friendly the policy environment is for non-governmental charity groups across China. NGOCN surveyed domestic Chinese non-profits in 10 cities, compiling results from 680 completed questionnaires and around 80 focus group sessions. The China NGO Project has translated the infographic below from NGOCN’s original.

Lhadon Tethong

on November 19, 2018

Lhadon Tethong is the Director of Tibet Action Institute and Co-Chair of the International Tibet Network, the global coalition of Tibet-related non-governmental organizations. She leads a team of technologists and human rights advocates in developing and advancing open-source communication technologies, nonviolent strategies, and innovative training programs for Tibetans and other groups facing heavy repression and human rights abuses. Lhadon was the Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet, where she worked from 1999-2009, and a key leader in the global campaign to expose China’s repression in Tibet in the lead-up to, and during, the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. She received the first annual James Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in 2011.

Zahra Baitie

on November 17, 2018

Zahra Baitie is the China Director at the Beijing-based consultancy Development Reimagined and a co-founder of the events company Kente and Silk. Born in the United Kingdom, brought up in Ghana, rooted in her Arab heritage, and educated in Ghana, the United States, and China, she considers herself a globally minded citizen with a pan-African spirit. She studied Global Affairs at Yale University with a focus on East Asia and African Studies and is passionate about the development of emerging countries. She is also a Schwarzman Scholar.

Prior to joining Development Reimagined, Baitie worked as a Consultant at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, where she worked on agricultural transformation, youth employment, investment facilitation, and public policy strategies for emerging countries. Baitie is dedicated to catalyzing transformative growth on the African continent, and she is fluent in Mandarin.