by Robert Whitcomb | Jul 1, 2016 | News
Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of ideological orthodoxy to ensure the power and legitimacy of Communist Party rule.
“The wavering of idealistic faith is the most dangerous form of wavering,” Mr. Xi told an assembly of party officials and members at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on July 1. “A political party’s decline often starts with the loss or lack of idealistic faith.”
“Turning our backs or abandoning Marxism means that our party would lose its soul and direction,” he said.
Mr. Xi has tried to energize the Communist Party with iron discipline and an appeal to nationalism meant to curb corruption and bureaucratic sluggishness — all with the aim of perpetuating the party’s power.
China’s economic slowdown has intensified the pressure to reinforce the party, including by appealing to national pride as expressed by China’s aggressive expansionism. But that, of course has met with increasing pushback from China’s neighbors.
“Xi’s speech was a celebration and a warning,” said Jude Blanchette, a Beijing-based researcher who is writing a book on Mao Zedong’s legacy, told The Wall Street Journal. It is “a reminder that Xi’s vision for China cannot be divorced from a strong, organized and highly disciplined Communist Party.”
To read a Wall Street Journal article on this news, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 29, 2016 | Initiative
Many Chinese journalists are giving up on that profession as the Communist dictatorship tightens media control and a technology boom opens new opportunities for being paid much more than most journalists could earn.
The Wall Street Journal notes that: {T}he trend is especially worrying in a huge country with such limited public power to scrutinize the government and big companies. Many journalists believe serious journalism is a lost cause in China. While online content appears to be flourishing, there is less coverage of hot-button issues. Online media outlets don’t have the leeway to cover news so they focus on ‘safer’ content such as sports, entertainment, lifestyle and occasionally business news.”
The decline in rigorous journalism almost certainly means more government and business corruption, which will slow China’s economic growth. But the government of President Xi Jinping is focused on doing everything possible to maintain the Communist Party dictatorship. Thus the huge nation, at least for the foreseeable future, will continue to be a strange mix of police state and frantic business activity.
To read The Wall Street Journal’s article in this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 24, 2016 | News
U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden has warned Chinese President Xi Jinping that Japan could acquire nuclear weapons “virtually overnight.”
Mr. Biden said that he had urged Mr. Xi to push North Korea to abandon its missile and nuclear- weapons developments. But it is highly unlikely that China will push its fellow dictatorship to do s0.
The vice president was referring to Pyongyang’s recent nuclear test and missile launches in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Mr. Biden said North Korea is building nuclear weapons that can strike as far as away the U.S. mainland. “And I say, so we’re going to move up our defense system,” suggesting that America will deploy an advanced U.S. missile interception system called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, in South Korea.
The vice president quoted Mr. Xi as saying, “Wait a minute, my military thinks you’re going to try to circle us.”
Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshige Seko asserted June 24 that Japan “can never possess nuclear weapons.”
To read The Japan Times’s story on this, please hit this link.
by Robert Whitcomb | Jun 20, 2016 | AI World Society Summit
China is pressing ahead with efforts to make it easier for dictatorships like that of Chinese President Xi Jinping to censor information on the Internet under the guise of “cybersovereignty’’. Cybersovereignty is a concept used to try to maintain the power of dictatorships through the suppression of opposition voices.
Stephenie Andal warns in The Diplomat: “Yet while control measures such as the Great Firewall (Beijing’s central censorship apparatus) remain a great source of concern for cyber scholars, the overwhelming focus on the domestic aspects of Chinese cyber policy dangerously ignore the broader, international implications inherent in China’s move towards cybersovereignty, which I argue, we should see as nothing less than an innovative and bold push to reshape the global contours of cyberspace in China’s favor. We might do well to subvert our scholarly bias of China as playing second fiddle to other global power players (most prominently the United States), especially in areas of innovation, cyber policies, and digital communications, and explore the possibility of a China that…is playing a strategic ‘long game’ with highly forward-thinking digital policies. This presents to us a much more complex and challenging picture of a China intent on ‘leading the pack’ in a post-utopian cyber age, with thinking that may be as innovative as it is dangerous.’’
She concludes:
“China’s drive for cybersovereignty should be seen as a calculated power play by Beijing to seize on the moment of transition that the global Internet is in at present, a time when growing geographical and political cleavages in the global cyber terrain are becoming increasingly apparent. The inclusion of the term ‘multilateral’ (in reference to Internet governance) in an outcome document approved recently at the U.N. General Assembly, reflects China’s growing power on the global cyber stage and its sway over future approaches to how to govern and shape the global Internet….’’
To read Ms. Andal’s column in The Diplomat, please this this link.
