As China continues to tighten information flows in and out of the country, how reliable are statistics from official Chinese sources? Recent media pieces have highlighted the deepening lack of government transparency and...
The first reaction by China’s state-media apparatus following the escalating U.S.-China trade war last week was to censor online commentary about the scale of tariffs. Now, it has responded with targeted messaging intended to...
On Monday, Xi Jinping presided over a highly publicized meeting with CEOs from China’s tech giants. In the eyes of many observers, the meeting served as a signal that, after years of relentless regulatory crackdowns on the...
Viral video and transcripts of two unusually critical speeches about the state of the Chinese economy—by economists Gao Shanwen and Fu Peng, respectively—have been deleted from multiple platforms almost as fast as netizens can...
Leaders of southeast Asian countries gathered in Laos this week for the annual ASEAN summit and the concurrent East Asia Summit attended by major global partners. China, represented by Premier Li Qiang, hailed the “substantial...
WeChat has censored an article on a trending question on Douyin: “Why are jails packed this year?” The article, a short synthesis of a viral genre of short video, claimed that detention centers are overfilled due to China’s...
The European Union is the latest actor to impose punitive tariffs against Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), following a vote by its members on Friday. Western governments—including Canada and the U.S., which previously imposed...
This week, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a militant separatist group from Pakistan’s southwestern province, claimed responsibility for a series of coordinated attacks that left 73 people dead across numerous provinces....
Hu Xijin has seemingly been banned from posting to Chinese social media platforms. Hu, formerly the editor-in-chief of the nationalist tabloid Global Times, appears to have run into trouble for “misconstruing” the...
The Third Plenum, a major Party conference on China’s economy held roughly once every five years, came to a close this past Wednesday. The closed-door meeting of Central Committee members reaffirmed the Party’s commitment to...
As Chinese local governments struggle with high levels of debt, moribund infrastructure projects, falling tax revenues, shrinking land-use fees, and increased demands for local welfare spending, some local government departments...
Far-right parties across Europe made major gains in this weekend’s European Parliament elections. The gains were most pronounced in one of the E.U.’s most influential members, France, where Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen’s...
While touring Shandong last week, Xi Jinping hosted a symposium on the economy. The gathering has inspired hopes that the upcoming Third Plenum, a twice-a-decade meeting on economic reform, will be a harbinger of change for...
After a decades-long infrastructure spending spree, many of China’s local governments now find themselves saddled with unsustainable levels of debt and a surplus of vastly ambitious but often underutilized infrastructure...
A recent WeChat post from oft-controversial entrepreneur, publicity hound, and philanthropist Chen Guangbiao urging the Chinese government to keep its hands off people’s pocketbooks has attracted many supportive comments from...
Chinese state media often describe the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as a “flagship project” of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and Pakistan’s city of Gwadar as a “flagship project” of the CPEC. The CPEC has...
This year’s Two Sessions—the annual meetings of the legislative National People’s Congress (NPC) and the advisory Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)—are taking place amid grim economic conditions. The...
On February 28, a post by Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping about reviving the Chinese economy was deleted from WeChat, continuing a trend toward increased censorship of articles about the state of the economy. As a...
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