The attitude of the German business community vis-à-vis China is increasingly torn between short-term profits and long-term strategic interests. While China has been Germany’s largest trading partner since 2016, with commercial ties registering a total of 186.6 billion euros in 2017 (Nienaber 2018), a forthcoming strategy paper of the Federation of German Industries (BDI)—Germany’s most […]

In July this year, 89 workers at the Shenzhen Jasic Technology Co. Ltd demanded the right to set up a workplace union. In the past decade there has been an explosion of strikes in Shenzhen, and this dispute is one of the many where workers have demanded better working conditions, owed wages, unpaid social insurance, […]

When he learned that Liu Xiaobo had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Vaclav Havel—who had not been acknowledged by the Nobel Academy—was extremely happy. Although his doctor had strictly forbidden him to drink alcohol, he opened a bottle he kept hidden for the great occasions, and drank to his success. When asked to write a foreword for the collection of Liu’s works that I edited, he did it enthusiastically. In 2011, the Czech dissident who had spent many years in prison before being rewarded with the presidency of the Czechoslovak Republic, died in Prague, aged 75.