The Procuratorate and Public Interest Litigation (PIL)
The Chinese Procuratorate, which exercises a general supervisory jurisdiction under the Constitution over the application of law, has now stepped in to institute PIL on behalf of the state and public...
View ArticleA new book by Dr Jue Jiang
Criminal Reconciliation in Contemporary China: An Empirical and Analytical Enquiry, by Jue Jiang. Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, US: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016. v+292 pp. £85.00 (cloth). This...
View Article“Low-end” people in China
Yesterday I blogged about the response of He Weifang and others to the sudden expulsion from Beijing of large numbers of migrant workers (many not really migrant any more, but settled in Beijing)....
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Does English-language (or more broadly, “Western”) media focus too much on...
[CORRECTION JAN. 8 2018: I have learned that the writer is a she. Please deem all relevant pronouns as changed accordingly.] A Chinese student of mine recently brought to my attention this interesting...
View ArticleWhataboutism: valid and invalid forms
A recent discussion on a Chinese politics discussion group of which I’m a member raised the issue of whataboutism. What prompted it was a set of tweets and responses from Chen Weihua, the chief...
View ArticleThe Xinjiang Initiative
The Xinjiang Initiative is a project to raise awareness about the terrible things happening in Xinjiang right now. I urge those in a position to do so to join in. For information, see the notice at...
View ArticleControversy about Chinese students at Bard College: not what it appears to be...
I’ve never been to Bard College, but it has always been a little special to me, since that’s where Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were students when they met and started Steely Dan. More recently, it’s...
View ArticleIntroducing two new co-bloggers
It’s my pleasure to welcome two new co-bloggers here: Ling Li and Nils Pelzer. Ling is a Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna, where she has also served as a...
View ArticleDagong bond rating agency taken over after licenses suspended
The Financial Times reports that the Dagong bond rating agency has been taken over by a state-owned investment company after regulators suspended its licenses for lax corporate governance and conflicts...
View ArticleThe “rule of law” and the concept of an “essentially contested concept”
Recently in the course of some writing I’ve had to address the problem of “essentially contested concepts.” But because the piece I’m writing has a strict word limit, I can’t explain there why I think...
View ArticleThe Wang Liqiang spy/defector story: real or fake?
Wang Liqiang is a Chinese national now in Australia who recently went to the Australian press (here, The Age) to say he worked for Chinese intelligence. (It’s very hard to construct that sentence...
View ArticleThe Wang Liqiang spy/defector story: real or fake?
Apologies for the last post, which went out without a title.
View ArticleWhy are heroes so important in narrative construction of public crises?
Yesterday, a reporter asked me: Why do state media and officials praise individuals for their heroic actions in a public crisis and what is the government’s strategy to shape the narrative? Here is my...
View Article“I can say it, but you can’t say it.”
“Party, government, military, civilian, and academic, east, west, south, north, and center, the party leads everything” – Chinese Communist Party, 2017 “China is a Leninist state led by a vanguard...
View ArticleExcellent Caixin piece on COVID-19: who knew what and when
Caixin recently published a good piece on COVID-19; consistent with the Chinese government’s attitude toward good information about this disease, it praised the authors and encouraged even more...
View ArticleOrgan Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China: A Review of the Evidence
[Revised March 11, 2020 to remove repetitious material. My thanks to an alert reader.] Here is a blockbuster report from Matthew Robertson, following close on the heels of the Final Judgment of the...
View ArticleWelcome to new blogger Yu-Jie Chen
I’m very pleased to have signed up Dr. Yu-Jie Chen as a co-blogger. Yu-Jie, who will join the Academia Sinica in Taiwan in October as an assistant professor, is currently a Global Academic Fellow at...
View ArticleRebranding of weiwen and rebirth of Zhou Yongkang’s stability maintenance...
The latest Ping’an China Small-Group re-erects the stability maintenance steering machine that had grown significantly under Zhou Yongkang but was downsized in 2014 and disbanded in 2018. Recently,...
View ArticleWho controls Huawei? Another look
A new paper by Tim Rühlig provides the most detailed analysis of the governance structure of Huawei that has been published so far. Tim Rühlig, a research fellow at the Swedish Institute of...
View ArticleBeaconism and the Trumpian Metamorphosis of Chinese Liberal Intellectuals
“Civilizational beaconism, sharing with its nationalistic counterpart—civilizational vindicativism—the heritages of scientific racism and social Darwinism imported in late-Qing, renders the Chinese...
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