Far from being marginalized, Russia is winning friends and trading partners around the world.
Taking the long view
Late last year, Mu Lan, the editor of Probe International’s Three Gorges Probe news service in Chinese, followed the central leg of China’s massive South-to-North Water Diversion Project with his camera as it made its way from Hubei Province to Beijing, the project’s ultimate destination.
Without corruption, some ask, can the Chinese Communist Party function?
Has President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign accelerated China’s economic slowdown? Some say officials are “engaged in a test of will” with Xi, delaying decisions that would promote growth to avoid risks and to punish Xi for taking “away their cheese without offering anything in return.” The Washington Post reports.
Good governance requires taxes, not foreign aid
New research provides more evidence that foreign aid undermines good governance.
Bombardier Transportation accused of corruption in South Korea
Canadian aerospace giant Bombardier accused by South Korean prosecutors of making gifts to local officials in relation to a multibillion dollar metro elevated train project described as “more like a bus” in reality, a bus expected to cost Yongin taxpayers $3.5 billion over the next 30 years, including maintenance. CBC reports.
Is China’s Internet becoming an intranet?
China’s ban on virtual private networks (VPN) prompts this ChinaFile conversation between global experts on the potential outfall from Beijing’s latest pullback on citizens’ online access. According to award-winning journalist George Chen: “These days, the government is keen to regulate everything it hates and promote everything it likes with new legislation or renewed enforcement. That’s what the rule of law Chinese-style is all about.”
The EU promoted reckless borrowing and spending. Now German taxpayers will suffer
It will now be the turn of Germany — more likely, individual German taxpayers — to take on the role of suckers.
Yang Zili and the paranoid regime
Xiao Shu in this piece comparing the 2001 incarceration of fellow Chinese journalist, Yang Zili, and his colleagues today from the Transition Institute, explores the deeper psychological cause driving the country’s “stability-obsessed regime”: a paranoia so institutionalized that it drives state power compulsively. A must read.
China: Update – Release of human rights defender Mr Huang Kaiping
After three months of ‘enforced disappearance’, Huang Kaiping, has been returned to his home in Beijing. Front Line Defenders reports.
Five years after earthquake, Haiti’s journalists show resilience amid threats to freedom of the press
Divided before the earthquake of 2010, the disaster united Haiti’s media landscape out of necessity and in the face of a strong adversary in the administration of President Michel Martelly. Nowadays, that landscape is facing a tight squeeze from a government opposed to press freedom and moneyed NGOs with communication agendas that outnumber the country’s news organizations 10 to 1. Shearon Roberts for Journalism in the Americas reports.
China crushes intellectual freedom even after decades of successful market reforms
The brutal treatment of champions of freedom is a stark reminder that market reforms are not enough to serve as the foundation of a free society. Atlas Network reports.
To the piste!
The constant stream of news coverage on China’s water crisis hasn’t dampened Beijing’s bid to host the 2022 winter Olympics and the production of a key, water-guzzling component of that bid: snow. The Economist reports.
Policy: Four gaps in China’s new environmental law
China’s new environmental protection law is not enough without robust implementation mechanisms, accountability regimes and institutional arrangements. This report for the science journal Nature identifies four gaps that will cause challenges for the new law.
China’s environmental enforcement glitch
Declaring “war on pollution” is just the first step, writes Elizabeth Economy in this terrific piece for ChinaFile on the need for Beijing to invest more in the fundamentals of environmental protection: the enforcement of regulations and the necessary human and financial resources to those on the front-line of clawing back blue skies and clean water for China.
Looking forward to the moment when you return: Zhou Qinghui to Huang Kaiping
As China continues its crackdown on reform-minded scholars and civil liberties, the wife of yet another detained member of the respected Beijing-based think tank, Transition Institute, has spoken out in an open letter circulated online. Reaching out to her husband, Huang Kaiping, in the only way she now can, Zhou Qinghui recounts in vivid voice their first meeting, as fifth graders, up until the current day’s events, cast in shadow by the question mark of an uncertain future under a repressive regime.
Patricia Adams
Dai Qing
Fan Xiao
Lawrence Solomon
Mu Lan
Probe International
Lisa Peryman
Probe Media
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