Rap propaganda is the latest manifestation of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s campaign to consolidate power using soft culture tropes to massage his image with audiences in China. Early in 2016, an official rap cartoon was circulated extolling the virtues of…
The photo depicts Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meeting President Hu Jintao in 2006, and is from TV footage from Times Now in India. This photo is used in the cover art for the book Are We Deceiving Ourselves Again? Lessons…
A review of China’s Future? David Shambaugh, London: Polity Press, 2016. John W. Garver, Emeritus Professor Georgia Institute of Technology A leading U.S. authority on China’s politics, David Shambaugh of George Washington University, has authored what amounts to a manifesto…
A 2011 biography of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah or king of Iran from 1941 to 1979, lays out a number of haunting similarities between Iran’s experience under the shah and the Chinese Communist Party’s rule of China today. Authored…
China watchers are to Third Plenums of Chinese Communist Party Congresses as film buffs are to the Oscars. One reason is the storied history of Third Plenum Decisions in the post-Mao era. Two of them marked epochal shifts in China’s…
In November 1978, Deng Xiaoping presided over the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which launched China’s reform and opening up. Thirty five years later, the Third Plenum of CCP’s Eighteenth Congress was…
The Communist Party of China has been grappling with corruption almost from its birth. Corruption was one of the major issues during the 1989 anti-government demonstrations. The leadership, in fact, responded to public anger over corruption and what was then…
State-building seems to be a never-ending task for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Since its founding, the government has revamped its administrative system more than 10 times. Reform has sped up recently, with a goal to transform governmental functions…
China’s political leaders are grasping for ways to clean up a notoriously polluted environment without sidetracking economic growth plans. For longtime observers of the East Asia scene, this evokes a sense of déjà vu replete with flashbacks to South Korea…
In early 2012, China's government, in cooperation with the World Bank, issued a major white paper on the economic and social challenges facing the country in the period through 2030. The report called for a new model of economic growth…