Earlier in 2019, Jessica Chen Weiss wrote a well-considered article for Foreign Affairs in which she argues that China does not seek to export authoritarianism, but merely wants to make the world safer for itself. There is indeed no National Endowment for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, nor has Beijing set up a Peaceful Co-existence Radio […]
Category archives: Analyses
Bekijk Taiwan niet steeds door een Chinese lens: vier misverstanden voor de komende verkiezingen
Op 11 januari zijn er in Taiwan verkiezingen voor de president en voor het parlement, de Wetgevende Yuan. In de korte geschiedenis van deze jonge democratie zijn dit de meest cruciale verkiezingen tot nu toe. Kiest de bevolking voor weerstand bieden aan Peking of voor langzame integratie? Het eiland komt meestal in het nieuws in […]
Summarising Zhao Dingxin’s lessons from 1989 for the Hong Kong protests: protest ecology and conflicting state legitimation
Talking about the on-going protests in Hong Kong, pundits love to invoke the 1989 Movement that famously centred around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I myself have previously argued that it might be more useful to compare the overall effect on Hong Kong of the ‘Hard Had Revolution’ to the effect that the February 28 Incident […]
Hong Kong shows that ‘communism’ is the most efficient creator of alienation
As Hong Kong is gripped in chaos and violence, there is something interesting about the ‘strongly condemn’ statements that Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor puts out at her rare press conferences. Completely in line with the rules prevalent on the Mainland, the first thing she condemns is always the harm done […]
The Hard Hat Revolution will not be Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Square, it might be its February 28 Incident
Tension had been building for a long time. It had been a while since the former colonial power had returned the island to China, but rather than being grateful, the local inhabitants were increasingly chafing under what they saw as a breakdown in the rule of law and encroachment on their economic opportunities. Finally, one […]
Party Not Required: nationalism’s long-term threat to the Chinese Communist Party
Xi Jinping’s well-documented attempts to become ‘chairman of everything’—as several observers have argued before me—are in fact a testament to his need to shore up weak central power. The Chinese party-state works through broad project campaigns, launched through the apparatus of party committees and propaganda organs. Local leaders take the cue to come up with […]
The dangerous long-term weakness of authoritarian leadership
A strong leader can put the house in order. Authoritarian figures with a vision have some successes on their names, notably in East Asia. But their cheerleaders often underestimate how much their achievements were possible because of broad support. As Paul Krugman pointed out in his 1994 Foreign Affaris article debunking uncritical celebration of the […]
Never Forget Chinese Nationalism’s Ethnocentrism
Saying that Chinese increasingly assertive nationalism has a rather ethnocentric streak is nothing new, at least not for those who follow China. However, only when you actually read the source material in Chinese, is the starkness of the PRC’s racialism really driven home. This is something analysts, and other people paid to have opinions on […]
Carving up the Girdle of Emerald: colonialism’s violent cleavages
The evil of colonialism is not expressed in a sum of its benefits and downsides. These debates over British railways in India and economic development miss the point of colonialism entirely. Colonialism is violence. It is not just that it entails violence as an inevitable product of its system, colonialism itself is an act of epistemic […]
Is China trying use the COC to beef up its Article 281 defence?
Besides ‘we do not accept,’ another legal argument China used to argue that the Philippines case before An Arbitral Tribunal under Annex VII of UNCLOS was inadmissible was that the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties (DOC) in the South China Sea prevented arbitration as per UNCLOS Article 281. This article states that if states […]