The scandal of Li Qihong, the female mayor of the Guangdong Province boom town of Zhongshan, highlights a backsliding of corruption in Chinese politics. Particularly, the increasing collusion between party cadres and businessmen has made the issue more acute. Even as the Chinese Communist Party... MORE

Premier Wen Jiabao’s just-completed weeklong tour to South Korea, Japan, Mongolia and Burma (Myanmar) provides a good opportunity for evaluating the extent to which China is playing a “responsible leadership role” in world affairs. In President Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy report released in late... MORE

Beijing authorities have raised the country’s security alert to the highest level—the first time since the August 2008 Olympics Games—in the wake of a spate of killings in schools and kindergartens that left at least 27 dead and some 100 injured. Given the resources that... MORE

North Korean President Kim Jong-Il’s recently completed visit to Beijing, which came on the heels of South Korean President Lee Myun-bak’s trip to attend the 2010 Shanghai Expo, has testified to China’s unprecedented clout over strategic developments in the Korean Peninsula. Yet despite Dear Leader... MORE

Two unusual developments in elite Chinese politics have observers wondering if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is moving toward political reform and changes in its policy toward ethnic minorities. On April 15, Premier Wen Jiabao published an article in the People’s Daily—the Party's mouthpiece—that heaped... MORE

Are there policy and administrative failures behind the unprecedentedly severe drought that is devastating China’s southwestern provinces? The same question is being asked about the unusually ferocious sandstorm that blanketed northern and eastern China last week. The country’s ecological degradation has had dire global consequences.... MORE

A major theme of the just-concluded National People’s Congress (NPC) is social and distributive justice, or the ways and means to help disadvantaged sectors such as peasants and migrant workers in China get a fairer share of the fruits of the “Chinese economic miracle.” Premier... MORE

China’s on-going tussle with the United States over issues including Taiwan, Tibet and trade is in a sense nothing new. For more than two decades, Sino-U.S. relations have periodically gone through rough patches over these and related causes of disagreement. What is new is China’s... MORE

While the furor over cyber attacks against Google has lapsed somewhat, the Sino-American confrontation over the larger issue of Internet security and global digital warfare is expected to intensify in the near future. This is particularly in light of the deterioration of bilateral ties due... MORE

The Hu Jintao administration has significantly tightened policy over Tibet in an apparent attempt to ensure the proverbial Chinese Communist Party’s “long reign and perennial stability” in the restive region. More hard-line cadres are being appointed to run the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). While unprecedented... MORE