The people of Hong Kong have been fighting for many years to hold China to the commitments Beijing voluntary made in 1984 allowing Hong Kong a “high degree of autonomy,”…
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I recently finished reading James Wilson’s excellent book The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America with a deep sense of shame. Whether we call it genocide, genocidal, or…
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The United States is facing perhaps the most dangerous moment since the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack or the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This danger does not stem from terrorism, immigration,…
read moreThe recent cyberattack on Sony, allegedly perpetrated by North Korea, highlights a dangerous increase in the vulnerability of our globalized world.
read moreIn my CNN.com blog post, I argue that if Xi Jinping’s top down approach is not matched by a bottom-up empowerment of the people being most harmed by China’s corruption pandemic it will have little chance of success. When Chinese media reports critically on the vast wealth accrued by the families of former Chongqing leader Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, and others, it’s easy to remember the Bloomberg and New York Times reports on the millions of dollars held by Xi’s and former Premier Wen Jiabao‘s families. And no one believes that China’s government leaders, among the wealthiest in the world, are getting rich from their salaries alone.
read moreI’m just back from spending four days in the Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India visiting my Tibetan friends exiled there.
As is well known, the Chinese army marched into Tibet in October 1949 and routed the Tibetan army a year later. In 1951 China and a Tibetan delegation signed the “seventeen point agreement” codifying the new status of Tibet as a national regional autonomy within the People’s Republic of China. As conditions worsened, a Tibetan national uprising broke out in 1959, which was crushed by the Chinese, resulting in an estimated eighty-seven thousand Tibetan deaths
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