Kelley Currie is a foreign policy analyst and human rights advocate specializing in East Asian affairs, particularly China and Burma. She contributed extensively to The Weekly Standard between 2009 and 2011, writing frequently on Chinese human rights issues, U.S.-China relations, and democracy movements in Asia. She has held senior positions focused on international human rights policy, including serving in the U.S. State Department.
Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi held her first ever meeting with the top civilian official in the Burmese regime, President Thein Sein, in the isolated capital of Naypyidaw. There had earlier been rumors that Ms. Suu Kyi would be going to Naypyidaw to attend a government sponsored…
On July 23, two high-speed trains collided on an elevated track near the Chinese city of Wenzhou, killing at least 39 people and injuring several hundred. In the days since the crash, shock and sympathy have turned to outrage as the Chinese government's propagandistic, face-saving response to the…
In a post last week about the dramatically deteriorating human rights situation in China, there remained many questions about what had really happened to Dr. Yang Hengjun, the Australian citizen of Chinese descent, who disappeared one week ago and was believed to have been in Chinese custody.On his…
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu took a question at a press conference on Tuesday about the disappearance of another dissident. Her response, which quickly pinged around the Chinese online community and its English-language China-watching counterparts, was to blithely assert: "I have…
During his annual address to the Tibetan people on March 10, the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet announced that he wished to complete his decades-long effort to divest political authority from the Dalai Lama’s own institution. While the media has characterized this as a retirement announcement, it…
In mid-February, a mysterious posting on a Chinese language website called on Chinese citizens to take to the streets for low-risk meet-ups at locations with heavy pedestrian traffic throughout the country, starting on Sunday February 20 at 2 p.m. (Beijing local time). Labeled by the organizers as…
John Thune's announcement that he would not be running for president in 2012 has overshadowed another bit of news on the GOP primary front: current U.S. ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, has apparently taken a further step toward running for president, presumably as a Republican, with the launch…
Over the past week, India's lively (and often wildly irresponsible) media has been flogging a sensational story about a tax raid on the monastery housing a prominent Tibetan lama who is presently exiled in India. The stories concern a 25-year-old Tibetan named Ogyen Trinley Dorje. He is also known…
Americans don't really need another reason not to link the senseless actions of a deranged individual in Tucson to the tenor of American political discourse, but it is worth considering how accusations that the lunatic shooter in Tucson was influenced by our political rhetoric feed directly into…
Belarusian president Aleksander Lukashenko is often called "Europe's last dictator." He has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for most of the past two decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, hiding under the protective wing of Moscow and living off its gifts of subsidized fuel. Over the past…
In the Washington Post yesterday, Jackson Diehl had a column on the failure of the State Department to provide funding to something called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a collection of providers of gizmos that can circumvent firewalls constructed on the Internet by repressive…
When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, the authoritarians in Beijing responded in their typical, iron-fisted fashion. The Foreign Ministry immediately called the award "blasphemy" and a "desecration," and characterized Liu as a common criminal. They cancelled…
Motor Trend magazine's blog reported this week that Cadillac, the flagship luxury brand of our very own Government Motors, has engaged in a sponsorship deal with a state-owned Chinese propaganda film company to link its cars with a new film on the glorious history of the Chinese Communist…
In its Friday afternoon news dump before Labor Day weekend, the White House announced that President Obama had invited the ten leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to join him for a summit in New York on September 24. This will be the second U.S.-ASEAN summit, and the…
Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comments about U.S. interests in the resolution of competing claims of sovereignty over the South China Sea caused Beijing to lash out at what it perceived as unwarranted U.S. intervention in a matter outside its…
Last week, Chinese novelist Yu Jie was taken into custody and interrogated by the State Security Bureau after announcing that he would soon be publishing a book, titled China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, about China's premier. After his release, Yu insisted that he would continue to pursue publication…
Last week, the Chinese government issued a new propaganda piece in the form of a policy paper on its Internet control policies. It serves as a typical example of Beijing's Orwellian use of language and formalism to dress up its authoritarianism as legal and rational. In Beijing's alternate…
The New York Times ran an obituary on Saturday for Joan Hinton*. Hinton was the daughter of prominent American progressives. She grew up to become a physics student who worked on the Manhattan Project, but subsequently moved to Mao's China, where she ran a dairy farm with her husband, who was…
Today, during his visit to Japan, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman renewed accusations that North Korea is supplying Bashar al-Assad's Syrian regime with weapons of mass destruction. Lieberman warned that allowing this cooperation between North Korea and Syria to continue would be…
Kim Jong Il is reportedly back in Pyongyang after concluding an unofficial, semi-secret trip to China last week. After spending a couple of days in the northern Chinese industrial city of Dalian, where he reportedly drove around in a $400,000 Maybach limousine and stayed at a 5-star hotel, he…
The U.S. Geological Survey maintains that the earthquake that hit the remote Tibetan town of Jyeku (the Chinese call it Yushu) in the early morning of April 14 measured 6.9 on the Richter scale, while the Chinese government has said that the quake's intensity was 7.1 (which would mean that it was…
Late last week, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and most other major media outlets ran stories that portrayed U.S.-China relations as being on the mend after the recent rough patch. As evidence of the skillful personal diplomacy of President Obama, several news stories…
The AP had a great story this week about the growing number of self-identified "tea" activists in China. The article describes how activists, dissidents and even ordinary Chinese citizens often have their first encounter with state security when they are invited to "have a cup of tea" with the…
Last week, it was reported that Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, the State Department's point man on China, and his National Security Council counterpart Jeffrey Bader headed to China on a low profile mission to repair frayed ties. Steinberg had planned to go to China in February, but…
It takes a special talent to aggravate the Chinese government, the White House press corps, and the followers of the Dalai Lama all in one fell swoop. But the Obama administration managed to pull off that trifecta on Thursday with its poor handling of the Dalai Lama's meeting with the president.
One of the few moments of relief during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the tour de force performance of "Baghdad Bob" - AKA Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf -- the Iraqi Minister of Information who provided ludicrous statements about the status of Saddam Hussein's regime (always praise, he told us) and…
On Christmas Day 2009, the Chinese regime sentenced writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison for "incitement to subvert state power." His crime was co-authoring and circulating on-line a manifesto for democratic change in China called Charter 08, an intentional homage to the Czech…
After the Obama administration announced a new policy of "engagement" with odious military regimes last year, Burma went back to relative obscurity. Engagement yielded the predictable result (nothing), and other issues -- namely various manifestations of uncouth behavior emanating from Beijing -…
In a stunning post on its corporate blog, Google Senior Vice President David Drummond detailed a massive cyber attack on the companies proprietary information, including attempts to hack into the Gmail addresses of individuals who work on human rights in China. While never explicitly accusing the…
Today is one of those days that reminds me why I still have a subscription to the dead tree version of my local newspaper, the Washington Post. The reason: an interesting front-page story by long-time China hand John Pomfret on China's increasingly effective lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill (the…
After President Obama's November 2009 trip to Asia was widely panned by the media and commentators, the White House spin machine kicked into high gear in a vain attempt to make it seem like less of a disaster than it clearly had been. One of their main lines of attack was tocastigate the "rush to…
While the U.S.-China tiff at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was grabbing headlines last week, the conference hosts quietly issued a diplomatic note stating that Denmark "attaches great importance to the view of the Chinese government" on Tibet-related issues, "takes seriously the…
There has been some talk that when he accepts his Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama should mention Neda Agha-Soltan, the young Iranian woman whose death came to symbolize opposition to the Ahmedinejad/Khamenei regime, or Rebiya Kadeer, the inspirational Uighur leader. There are two more people…
Fresh off the triumph of their humiliation of President Obama during his Asian trip, this week the Chinese decided to stomp on America's Hat. I am, of course, referring to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's public dressing down of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during their joint appearance in…
After the initial round of poor reviews for President Obama's recent trip to Asia -- particularly but not exclusively the China portion -- the Empire has been striking back.  Obama administration officials, echoed by a number of "China-hands" in academia, think tanks and the media, have been…
Way back in March 2008, widespread protests erupted across the Tibetan plateau and were brutally crushed by a massive Chinese security response. On March 28, then-Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama, who had previously shown little interest in Tibet, sent a letter to President Bush…
When President Obama took the stage in Shanghai on Monday for his faux town-hall with 400 carefully selected Communist Youth Leaguers future Chinese leaders, he had already lost the crowd. Amid reports that the town-hall participants had been held in splendid isolation in the days prior to the…
President Obama has responded to critics of the administration's weak human rights policies by getting tough on Asian abusers during his trip.  Sort of.  While sitting across the table from the Burmese junta's prime minister, General Thein Sein, at the US-ASEAN Summit in Singapore, President…
As President Obama goes wheels up to Asia, it seems a good time to do a pulse check on his China policy. Â Today's Washington Post article on the art of labeling the US-China relationship raised questions about whether "strategic reassurance" has really become the authoritative articulation of…
It appears that President Obama has ended up pretty much nowhere with the Chinese on climate change, despite making this the sine qua non of US-China relations over the past nine months. Yesterday, Todd Stern, the administration's climate change negotiations czar, tried to lower expectations about…
When the news broke that President Obama was not going to meet with the Dalai Lama during his recent visit to Washington -- ending a practice that has spanned the past two decades and three previous presidents of both parties -- some China hands and Obama sycophants applauded the decision as a…