China is obscuring the scale of its Covid wave
One University of Hong Kong model has forecast that there could be up to a million Covid deaths in China over the…
China’s battle with Omicron is just beginning
Zero Covid seems to be ending in China. After three years of pushing this policy, the message from the state…
I was wrong about the CCP
I’ve always loved the Chinese national anthem. I used to think I was the loudest Communist Youth League pioneer as…
China’s zero-Covid anger is erupting
Protests seem to be breaking out in several major Chinese cities in what has been a week of horrors for…
Is Xi drifting away from Putin?
There’s been none of the wolf warriorism we’ve become used to from Chinese diplomats as President Xi met world leaders…
Is China finally easing its zero Covid strategy?
China’s president Xi Jinping has shaken hands with more world leaders over the last two days than he has met…
Does China’s WeChat show Twitter’s future?
Twitter today, WeChat tomorrow?
Xi Jinping has zombified the Chinese Communist party
In the run up to China’s National Party Congress, there were whispers that a high level official in state security…
An outcast in Xinjiang: The Backstreets, by Perhat Tursun, reviewed
Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Perhat Tursun’s unnamed protagonist is an outcast. A young Uighur in an increasingly Han city (Urumchi,…
It’s wrong to ban China from the lying-in-state
Unlike some Americans, China’s communists have no problem getting their heads around hereditary monarchy. Last week, President Xi sent his…
What Xi wants from Central Asia
President Xi Jinping hasn’t stepped outside his country since the pandemic began. For almost three years, China’s elderly leaders have…
What happens if Liz Truss designates China as a ‘threat’?
Early on in the Tory leadership campaign, Liz Truss was the only contender to say that she wanted to sit…
I’d be the perfect communist shill
Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and…
The closing of the Chinese mind
I was born in Nanjing five years after the Tiananmen Square protests. By then, records of the demonstrations and the…
Even the WHO has turned on China's zero-Covid strategy
Covid infections are finally falling in Shanghai. The city reported just over 2,000 cases on Tuesday, down from over 27,000…
The Shanghai lockdown is testing the limits of the CCP’s control
China’s lockdown protestors cannot be silenced
China's zero Covid crack-up
‘We’re being driven mad. Nobody is listening to us. They’ve politicised this disease.’ This week, the candid remarks of Zhu…
Is China's zero Covid game up?
Omicron has broken through China’s Covid wall. On Tuesday, the country saw a record-high of more than 5,000 cases, the…
Is an anti-Xi resistance emerging?
From the 1980s to 2017, at least every five years, China’s National Party Congress would be a moment of intriguing…
The fading legacy of Deng Xiaoping
After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, it was clear to pragmatists in the Chinese Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping,…
Frozen: can China escape its zero-Covid trap?
How China got stuck in a zero-Covid trap
The great Chinese puzzle: how to adapt the language to modern communication technologies
Any student of Chinese will sympathise with the 17th-century Jesuit priest Fr Emeric Langlois de Chavagnac when he wrote: ‘One…
What happened to China's missing tennis star?
Did a senior Chinese politician rape one of the country’s leading tennis stars? That certainly seemed to be the allegation…
Peng Shuai and China’s mistress problem
Mistresses remain a potent status symbol in China
Peng Shuai appears in sinister ‘proof of life’ video
The Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai sits in a crowded restaurant surrounded by friends and her coach, who is going…
