Ross Terrill is an Australian-born author, journalist, and China scholar based in the United States, known for his acclaimed biographies of Mao Zedong and his extensive writings on Chinese politics and society. He contributed to The Weekly Standard from 1999 to 2017, writing frequently on China, U.S.-Asia foreign policy, and Australian politics. Terrill is a research associate at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.
Is there really a Beijing Model of governance: authoritarian politics steering economic growth, diluting the appeal of the West's democracy and freedom? The ruler of China thinks so. He's focused on sticking around and seeing it triumph.
Is there really a Beijing Model of governance: authoritarian politics steering economic growth, diluting the appeal of the West’s democracy and freedom? The ruler of China thinks so. He's focused on sticking around and seeing it triumph.
After Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party defeated Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, a giddy New York Times assured Canadians, “Your long national nightmare is over.” The Times scribe felt “like a broken human after almost 10 years of Harper rule.” Oh, the suffering! Mr. Trudeau is different, she…
Canberra has joined Tokyo and other U.S. allies in Asia by electing a conservative government vowing less tax on business, robust defense, support for the United States, and guarded cooperation with China. A big victory in Australia’s national election on September 7 for Tony Abbott’s…
Canberra
China and the United States both launch leadership transitions this week. Earnest persons, in fear or hope, turn a raindrop of coincidence into a storm of meaning. In fact, November 6 here and November 8 in Beijing, when the Chinese Communist party (CCP) opens its 18th congress, have nothing in…
A Washington tortured by Vietnam was flummoxed in 1972 when Australian voters made the Labor party’s antiwar Gough Whitlam prime minister after 23 years of conservative rule. Entering Henry Kissinger’s office at the White House on December 23 for a conversation about China relating to President…
The crisis over Bo Xilai in huge Chongqing, a city-state double the size of Switzerland with 28 million people, proves the left lives on in China, despite 35 years of Communist party flight from Maoism—and despite U.S. China specialists’ calling leftists “conservatives.” A pro-free-market right is…
With 28-year-old Kim Jong Eun propped up to handle Pyongyang’s succession crisis, three facts about North Korea are salient. Kim Jong Il, who died December 17, like his father was a tyrant whose damage makes Qaddafi seem a choirboy. After six decades of peaceful competition with the capitalist…
The millions visiting World Expo in Shanghai find no mention at the China pavilion of Mao Zedong. Nor did those attending the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 encounter any mention of Chairman Mao. Yet while the Communist government tries to present an apolitical and…
Boston
Much dire rhetoric has been unleashed in liberal quarters about the damage done by George W. Bush's foreign policy. The alleged damage, however, is not evident in Asia. When Ken Lieberthal, a respected China specialist and Democratic loyalist, spoke at Harvard early this year, I asked him to name a…
While the Chinese state often appears masterful in its dealings with the non-Chinese areas of the People's Republic of China (PRC) like Xinjiang and Tibet, it also seems alarmed at the volatility of its vast semi-empire.
Chongqing
Mao's Last Revolution
"THE SURVIVAL OF LIBERTY in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," President Bush declared on January 20. Yet influential opinion insists that an exception be carved out for East Asia. There, they say, freedom is optional, hierarchical "Asian values" reign, and…
Melbourne
"EVERYONE NOW UNDERSTANDS there is a problem with Taiwan's status," said President Lee Teng-hui in a recent conversation with American visitors. But in fact, not everyone does seem to understand this. The United States has become locked into a Beijing-flavored One China policy based on a fiction.…