Month: August 2021

Advertisement At the U.S.-China High-Level Strategic Dialogue held in Anchorage, Alaska in March, Chinese State Councillor Yang Jiechi fired this broadside: “The United States is not qualified to talk to China in a condescending manner and the Chinese people will not accept that.” This statement was well received in China and t-shirts and other products bearing the words circulated among Chinese people. It is by now well known that Chinese diplomats have become considerably more forceful in their pronouncements since April 2020, in an approach dubbed “wolf warrior diplomacy.” Blunt…

Aug 28th 2021 CHINA HAS an anger-management problem, at least when dealing with small and mid-size Western democracies. The fate of Lithuania, a European Union member on the shores of the Baltic Sea, is a case in point. Listen to this story Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Listen on the go Get The Economist app and play articles, wherever you are Play in appPlay in app The country is being punished for agreeing that Taiwan, a democratic island that China claims as its own territory, may open…

Aug 28th 2021 HONG KONG CHINA’S PRESIDENT, Xi Jinping, is hardly ever grilled in public about what he thinks. The few interviews he has given have been highly staged. But his propagandists have been building a network of institutes devoted to studying his thoughts. In June one was established to research “Xi Jinping thought on the rule of law”. The following month, two others were founded to analyse, respectively, his pronouncements on economics and green development. It is the biggest mobilisation of academic effort to parse the speeches of a…

Aug 28th 2021 BEIJING LESS THAN two years ago Chinese officials warned that the spread of a deadly and highly transmissible virus was threatening the country’s economic stability and its people’s prosperity. Curbing the outbreak was a “major political task” said Hu Chunhua, a deputy prime minister and member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo. He said his instructions on how to tame the disease were to be treated as a “military-style order”. Mr Hu was speaking in August 2019, months before covid-19 was identified. He was referring to another…

“For a retailer without physical stores and a company that is virtually unknown to anyone but their target audience, Shein has utilised social media to reach consumers directly and become arguably the biggest digital clothing retailer,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of research firm Marketplace Pulse. BBC

“Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it,” Mr Biden said. BBC

Advertisement As a country located in the heart of Asia, Afghanistan is linked to China and East Asia in the east, the ex-Soviet Union controlled region in the north, South Asia in the south, and the oil-producing Middle Eastern region in the west. In modern history, the world’s major powers have understood the extremely important strategic position of Afghanistan, in terms of its geographic significance and resources. For this reason, Afghanistan was frequently invaded. The British for instance, attempted three invasions. In 1989, the Soviet Army withdrew from Afghanistan, and…