Rule of law: Beijing style
On Sunday, Hong Kong authorities charged 47 of its citizens for violating the National Security Law — a Beijing measure unilaterally imposed on Hong Kong at the end of June this past year. The 47 were ....
Tag: China
The WHO’s probe into Wuhan needs a dose of common sense
The WHO’s findings after their probe into COVID’s origins in Wuhan are rightly making a stir — not because of any credible insights, but because of the implausible public relations win it represents for Beijing. As Javier Hernandez of The New York ....
5 questions for Johan Norberg on the benefits of an open society
Societies prosper when they’re based around openness to innovation and outsiders, but there’s no guarantee that such an embrace will last forever. Indeed, humanity spent hundreds of thousands of years living in small, subsistent tribes, ....
5 questions for Claude Barfield on the future of trade policy with China
How much will the Biden administration change America’s approach to trade policy? In particular, what will our approach to China look like? Will we see a reversion to the pre-Trump status quo, or are US ....
Openness and the story of human progress: My long-read Q&A with Johan Norberg
History has featured several societies defined by openness. From Ancient Greece, to the Abbasid Caliphate, to China’s Song Dynasty, many cultures embraced trade and innovation for a time. But these societies eventually all turned inward, ....
Zhang Zhan, Vaclav Havel, and ‘picking quarrels’
This week, the Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison after having been detained in May on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Zhang’s crime: being one of the ....
The Trump administration’s fake China trade policy
Did you notice the deadline for protecting Americans from TikTok passed again? Sorry, the deadlines passed. They join multiple fake Huawei deadlines, fake implementation of export controls, fake phase 1 export quotas, fake supply chain shifts ....
The EU’s misguided drive to turn America’s Big Tech companies into public utilities
European Union (EU) regulators have targeted America’s Big Tech companies, aiming to make them some of the EU’s most heavily regulated firms. Draft legislation called the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act would ....
Why didn’t China have an Industrial Revolution before Europe did?
I’m pretty confident that America’s so-called “great stagnation” in productivity and economic growth is over. At least I am on odd-numbered days. And since there are slightly more odd- than even-numbered days in a year, ....
5 questions for Philip Coggan on the history of the world economy
The world economy developed as the result of increasing economic openness around the world and the fostering of connections between enterprising people. Will policymakers continue to embrace this approach, or are we likely to enter ....