Latest China Brief Articles
The Human Rights Record of the CCP Under Xi Jinping
The mass protests of May-June 1989—which ended with the killing of unarmed protesters commonly referred to as the “Tiananmen Square Massacre”—were, in all likelihood, the most significant grassroots challenge to Communist Party control in the 69-year history of the People’s Republic of China. Many of... MORE
Rice Bunnies and Iron Rice Bowls: Women’s Rights and National Security in China
Since January 2018, as part of a movement some experts are calling the largest student demonstration since June 1989, thousands of college students across China have been organizing both online and offline to demand that their universities take action against professors accused of sexually assaulting... MORE
Cyber Sovereignty and the PRC’s Vision for Global Internet Governance
Over the past eighteen months, major Western media outlets have followed every step of Facebook’s slow and painful fall from grace, including the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. However, while the stories focus heavily on Trump and Putin, it is CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping who... MORE
Living in the Day after Tiananmen: A Special China Brief Issue
A note from the Jamestown Foundation on the occasion of our first issue on human rights in the PRC: June 5, 2018 marks twenty-nine years since the day after Deng Xiaoping ordered the PLA to forcefully put down pro-democracy protests in central Beijing. A great... MORE
The Many Sides of Tentative Sino-Japanese Rapprochement
A recent, unexpected rapprochement between China and Japan has emerged more quickly than many observers thought possible. And unlike previous instances since the two countries recognized each other in 1972, the initiative this time seems to have come from the Chinese side. It must be... MORE
China’s Evolving Naval Force Structure: Beyond Sino-US Rivalry
During a recent discussion with PLA analysts, one interlocutor observed to the author that American strategists are slaves of their own history. That is, in interpreting the facts on the ground Americans cannot help but look to their own history to interpret the nature of... MORE
Amid Taiwan Tensions, Airline Spat Shows Sino-US Failure to Communicate
On May 25, while the United States passed a weekend of rest and remembrance in commemoration of Memorial Day, Taiwan’s air force scrambled fighters to trail two H-6 heavy bombers, sent by the PLA Air Force to trace a half-circle around the island’s south and... MORE
Why India Won’t Play Its ‘Tibet Card’
On February 22, India’s Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale issued a directive calling on leaders and government officials to stay away from events planned by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA)—the Tibetan government-in-exile—to mark the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s exile to India. In his note,... MORE
Chinese-Russian Defense and Security Ties: Countering US Encirclement
China recently announced plans to contribute to Russian support of the Assad regime in Syria, just one of many ways in which Chinese-Russian security ties have strengthened over the past five years (MOFA, May 14). Since the early 2010s, the two countries have been brought... MORE
New Evidence for China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang
This article is condensed from a longer paper, available for download here. (Editor's note: longer paper was updated with corrections September 2018) Since summer of 2017, troubling reports in Western media outlets about large-scale detentions of ethnic Muslim minorities (including Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz) in... MORE