China

Will hosting the Games help to liberalise China? Or is this a shameful moment of appeasement for a brutal dictatorship subjugating the Uyghur population and ‘disappearing’ internal dissidents?

In an extract from his new book, Freedom: How we lose it and how we fight back, Hong Kong dissident NATHAN LAW, once jailed by the regime, warns of Beijing’s tightening grip on culture.

Ahead of the COP26 conference, one reader has a suggestion for Boris Johnson's government to help Britain tackle climate change.

Richard Hamilton eschewed the knockabout nature of other purveyors of Pop Art, says Richard Holledge, but his work packed just as much of a punch. Pop! Whaam! Blam. Exclamation marks!!! Technicolour explosions. That’s Pop Art for you. The comic book whizz-bangs of Roy Lichtenstein and a group of post-war artists typified the 1960s for many – […]

Communist China once traced its roots to the end of the county’s civil war in 1949. A new, official narrative, however, is nudging the start of its march to global power back to the Second World War. Historian RANA MITTER explains the significance of this shift In China, there are a lot of very rich people. There are also […]

While the world has been distracted by other issues, relations between Beijing and Tehran have become closer than ever – with major implications for the rest of the globe, Jonathan Fryer reports. With European media attention largely focussed on Covid, Brexit and Donald Trump’s chances of re-election, a major geopolitical realignment has gone largely unnoticed. But […]

China was the gift that kept on giving. What was there not to like about a country that was bringing hundreds of millions out of poverty and into the global consumer market? Certain human rights indiscretions might need to be mentioned, ever so politely, but Western governments, policy makers and business leaders saw China more […]

With Donald Trump doing his best to up the ante in his stand-off with Kim Jong-Un, the optimistic argument goes that China will eventually step in to restrain its North Korean neighbour. But, KATHARINE MOON argues, this is wishful thinking. Pyongyang won’t kowtow to Beijing Those who want to end North Korea’s nuclear threats often […]