Month: August 2021

The Rise and Fall of the World’s Ride-Hailing Giant

Chin@Strategy

China’s leading ride-hailing company, Didi, was an operation of dubious legality when it raised its first big bucket of money nearly a decade ago. And in one way or another, it has been testing the authorities ever since. When a venture capital firm invested $3 million in the company in 2012, Didi lacked several of the state-issued licenses it needed to do business, two people familiar with the matter said. When Beijing, Shanghai and other big cities began requiring that drivers for ride-hailing platforms be local residents, Didi protested. Today,…

Chen Min’er Guarantees Xi Jinping’s Influence Into the 2030s

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Advertisement Chen Min’er rose to international prominence in the leadup to the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2017. With the institutionalized presumption that General Secretary Xi Jinping would choose a successor at the mid-point of his administration, Chen looked a good candidate for Xi to tip as the next leader. It was not to be, as Xi bucked tradition and refrained from tapping a leader-in-waiting. Throughout the 2017-2022 period rumors and political analysis alike have variously put Chen in and out of contention for Politburo Standing…

‘We were blackmailed’: Afghanistan’s former vice-president accuses US of forcing deals with the Taliban

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Afghanistan’s former president may have sensationally fled Kabul, but the former vice-president says he will stay and fight the Taliban.  Key points: Former vice-president Amrullah Saleh has declared himself president of Afghanistan after the former president fled the country Mr Saleh says the government was “blackmailed” into dealing with the Taliban by the United States He has gathered with military commanders from the former government in Panjshir Valley Amrullah Saleh spoke to ABC’s PM program from somewhere in the Panjshir Valley, his birthplace and a legendary source of resistance to invasion. Fighters…

Afghanistan’s Uyghurs fear the Taliban, and now China too

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There are about 12 million Uyghurs in China, concentrated in the northwestern Xinjiang province. Since 2017, they and other Muslim minorities have been subjected to a state campaign of mass detention, surveillance, forced labour, and, according to some accounts, sterilisation, torture and rape. China routinely denies all human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and says its camps are vocational centres designed to combat extremism. BBC

Why Nation-Building Failed in Afghanistan

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ISTANBUL – The United States invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago with the hope of rebuilding a country that had become a scourge to the world and its own people. As General Stanley McChrystal explained in the run-up to the 2009 surge of US troops, the objective was that the “government of Afghanistan sufficiently control its territory to support regional stability and prevent its use for international terrorism.” Why Nation-Building Failed in Afghanistan Afghan Presidential Palace via Getty Images Daron Acemoglu explains why the West’s top-down approach to establishing state institutions…

China’s Communist ‘Common Prosperity’ Campaign

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Advertisement Chinese firms have been strongly encouraged to focus on working for the common prosperity, focusing on social value. Many firms are toeing the line in order to avoid regulatory entanglement down the road. After all, the crackdown on the technology sector in recent months has been mainly geared toward protecting consumers and reducing the sway of large firms. China remains a Communist nation. This means that, even though China is instituting regulations that are not entirely dissimilar to those in the West, the regulatory environment is much more concentrated…

Kamala Harris Pledges U.S. Help for Afghan Women and Children

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HANOI — Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that the United States would work with its allies to protect women and children in Afghanistan, as the Taliban takeover forced her to confront troubling historical parallels and diverted attention from her original mission on a five-day trip to Southeast Asia. “There’s no question that any of us who are paying attention are concerned about that issue in Afghanistan,” said Ms. Harris, referring to the protection of women and children in that country. The vice president made her comments in the…

Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship

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One posting from Hainan Xiandun stood out. The ad, on a Sichuan University computer science hiring board from 2018, boasted that Xiandun had “received a considerable number of government-secret-related business.” The company, based in Hainan’s capital, Haikou, paid monthly salaries of $1,200 to $3,000 — solid middle-class wages for Chinese tech workers fresh out of college — with bonuses as high as $15,000. Xiandun’s ads listed an email address used by other firms looking for cybersecurity experts and linguists, suggesting they were part of a network. Chinese hacking groups are…

Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today

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Inconclusive origins It’s been more than 18 months since the first cases of a mysterious “pneumonialike illness” were reported in Wuhan, China. The world still isn’t any closer to understanding how the pandemic started. The director of national intelligence delivered a preliminary report to President Biden on Tuesday about the pandemic’s origin. But officials have yet to answer the biggest question: whether the coronavirus was the result of an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab or whether it emerged naturally in a spillover from animals to humans. Officials have repeatedly…

‘Window Is Rapidly Closing’ to Gather Key Evidence on Virus Origins, Scientists Say

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Experts studying the origins of the coronavirus for the World Health Organization warned on Wednesday that the inquiry had “stalled” and that further delays could make it impossible to recover crucial evidence about the beginning of the pandemic. “The window is rapidly closing on the biological feasibility of conducting the critical trace-back of people and animals inside and outside China,” the experts wrote in an editorial in the journal Nature. Several studies of blood samples and wildlife farms in China were urgently needed to understand how Covid-19 emerged, they said.…