In March 2018, the Chinese government ostensibly strengthened its fight against corruption by consolidating anti-graft efforts in a new ‘super agency’, the National Supervisory Commission (国家监察委员会, NSC). The NSC is part of President Xi Jinping’s signature campaign against corruption, which he describes as a matter of ‘life and death for the Party’ (The Economist 2012). […]

On 22 January, the innocuously-named ‘Frontier Services Group’ (FSG) announced plans to open a ‘training centre’ in Xinjiang, where approximately one million people are currently being held in concentration camps (Shepherd 2019). This announcement highlights a vital and underexplored element in the story of Xinjiang’s camps—the role of private paramilitary companies and transnational circulations. Frontier […]

For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) future depends, to a large degree, on the revitalisation of ideology. In his works, Xi repeatedly stresses the importance of ideological ‘belief’ (信仰) as the key ingredient of the Party organisation’s cohesion and discipline.

In the days following Britain’s vote to leave the European Union (EU) on 23 June 2016, the same questions appeared repeatedly in the newspaper headlines and media debates: ‘What now?’ ‘What do we do now?’ ‘Where do we go from here?’ These are the cries of people who suddenly find themselves in a confusing, uncertain […]

This is the text of the 77th George E. Morrison Lecture given by Jonathan Unger on 3 November 2016. The Lecture Series is sponsored by the China Institute and the Australian Centre on China in the World. Almost exactly half a century ago, starting in the middle of 1966, Mao Zedong unexpectedly launched the Cultural […]

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.

An article appeared recently in the South China Morning Post concerning an open letter calling for the dismissal of ‘triumphalist academic’ Hu Angang, a professor at Tsinghua University (Huang 2018). The letter, addressed to Tsinghua President Qiu Yong and signed by a number of university alumni, criticises Hu for ‘pursuing personal glory’ by claiming that […]