China

The gene editors can’t be trusted to self-regulate.

High-tech dominance won’t be solved with tariffs.

He didn't start it, but he's joining it.

It’s not because Beijing disappeared Meng Hongwei.

It's in the substance, not the principle of the thing.

The politics of protectionism mean it's here to stay.

Beijing’s nefarious activities in the United States are very worrying.

Beijing's crimes should elicit world condemnation.

Will the last country to recognize the country turn out the lights?

It's Trump's economy against the rest of the world—and as of now, America is winning.

The trip would likely coincide with the holiday marking the establishment of North Korea.

If the Chinese buy Steinway, we fully expect to see an epic America-First meltdown.

Plus, who owns a Twitter account?

Looks like trade wars are not that good or easy to win.

The British human rights advocate has worked to hold China accountable as the regime reaches "well beyond its borders to silence critics," he says.

One of China’s bravest departs again to the darkness.

We've reached tit-for-tat-for-tit in the president's trade war.

Creeping totalitarianism.

The mysterious assault on our diplomatic personnel in Cuba and China.

Beijing has increased its covert activities in the country.

Like hundreds of other media outlets, Vox.com sent reporters to cover President Donald Trump’s summit with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore. On June 13, Vox’s foreign editor Yochi Dreazen wrote a piece headlined, “The big winner of the Trump-Kim summit? China.” Dreazen’s analysis was…

After the "successful" Singapore summit, China appears to be relieving pressure on Kim Jong-un.

The tech titan uses faulty reasoning to end a Pentagon relationship.

The real action with spies nowadays lies not with Russia but with China.

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

The president surfaces concerns about "infiltration" of his campaign by the FBI.

Is Donald Trump a masterful negotiator or an unqualified bumbler? The truth likely lies somewhere in between, but we want to avoid closed-mindedness here and accept the possibility that a mercurial president can secure a beneficial agreement by means of wrong-footing the other side’s negotiators.…

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the organization that licenses EU television broadcasts and hosts the annual Eurovision Song Contest, has terminated its contract with a Chinese broadcasting company. The company, Mango TV, cut one of the songs from the contest’s broadcast—the gay-themed…

Carrots, sticks, and fashion diktats.

For over a decade there has been a trade war between China and America, with America playing the role of passive victim. China has required American firms investing in its country to take on a Chinese partner and turn over their technology, which it agreed not to do when it joined the World Trade…

The politics of applause.

Slapdash personnel decisions haunt the president and frustrate his party.

And Kudlow pulls back from TPP tease.

Washington shouldn’t neglect Taiwan and Hong Kong.

"I will do such things, what they are yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth."

What has the White House been tellings friendly voices in the media? I explore this in the new issue of the magazine. Here's an excerpt:

On Tuesday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un paid a surprise visit to Beijing. It was his first time out of his country since well before he became Dear Respected Leader in 2011. Kim arrived in an armored train, met with Chinese president Xi Jinping, and the two appeared in a series of photo-ops…

Mao Zedong characterized the relationship between China and North Korea as that of "lips and teeth." His point was that the lips provide a buffer to the teeth: Without them, China would be dangerously exposed. Despite the occasional toothache, that relationship has endured. China is North Korea's…

Kim Jong-un cut a cosmopolitan figure as a youth—Swiss finishing schools, trips abroad with his dictator dad—but he's turned reclusive as he's ruled North Korea. Indeed, he hasn't departed his country once since assuming the throne.

Long before John Bolton was named Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, the president often trusted the Fox News contributor over his own national security team. On July 17, when President Trump reversed himself at the last minute on his plan to recertify the Iran deal, it was thanks to an…

When is a steel tariff not a steel tariff? How about when it exempts two-thirds of steel imports?

The result of the Russian election was no surprise, and neither is the list of foreign leaders who lined up to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his victory.

The United States welcomes foreign investment. When companies from overseas buy into American firms, they provide a source of money that creates jobs and boosts innovation. But if the investor is Chinese, there is a wrinkle—increasingly, the wary eyes of regulators and intelligence officials want…

House Speaker Paul Ryan is pushing back on President Donald Trump’s announcement that he will impose hefty tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, his spokeswoman said on Monday.

Stein’s Law—named for the late economist Herbert Stein, who was chair of Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers—goes something like this: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” (His son Ben Stein’s law, by contrast, is probably this.) It’s one of the few pithy economic phrases…

To ask coherence of President Trump is to ask too much of a man with the attention span of a tweet, and for whom cognitive dissonance is not something he spends nights losing sleep over. So we have had large tax cuts, putting money into the pockets of consumers, which will enable them to increase…

President Donald Trump on Friday delivered a free-wheeling speech to CPAC, a campaign-style barnburner that went over well with the raucous crowd. And on his way out, he casually got around to the important stuff: major new sanctions on North Korea.

Over the past five years, the State Grid Corporation of China has come close to performing a feat that the European Union, despite its 13 trillion euro economy, has failed at for two decades: create an electricity grid stretching across much of Europe, introducing efficiencies and economies of…

Returning from Davos, the gathering of the global elite who had never before seen fit to invite this exhibitionist television celebrity, familiar with the bankruptcy courts, to eschew Big Macs in favor of canapés for a few days, Donald Trump faces a more demanding test next Tuesday, when he…

We’ve all seen parking places designated for the handicapped and for expectant mothers, but leave it to China to take that trend to a new and controversial level.

Reports emerged Monday that Vatican officials have been pressuring two Chinese Catholic bishops to resign their offices in order to be replaced with bishops favored by the Chinese government. The Vatican has not confirmed or denied the reports.

On Tuesday, January 22, President Donald Trump announced the imposition of a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels and a 20 percent tariffs on washing machines. Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the president to issue duties when an imported product becomes “substantial cause of…

How China infiltrated the U.S. classroom. Over at POLITICO, our own Ethan Epstein has a good look at how China has used soft power to exert influence with American students via funding "Confucius Institutes."

Diplomatic “talks” are often little more than that—gabfests—but Tuesday’s meeting in Vancouver signals a hard-headed determination to deal with the problem of North Korea. The talks, hosted by the U.S. and Canada, brought together 20 nations, primarily those that aided South Korea in the Korean War…

There's no such thing as a free gift! When I worked in Congress as an aide, I took a meeting with representatives of a foreign government about trade issues. They gave us all little business card holders as de minimis gifts. An older colleague, after the meeting ended, took all of them and threw…

If Trump set your teeth on edge in 2017, prepare for a grinding 2018. The story coming out of the White House is that the need to garner congressional support for his tax cut forced the president to restrain his reformist-populist-belligerent instincts until his signature legislation was on the…

It was a close call, but China finally edged out Congress for the Hypocrite of the Year Award. Congress grabbed the lead when Republicans, who bemoaned the wreckage President Obama did to the nation’s credit by adding some $7 trillion to $9 trillion to our national debt, decided that adding to our…

Over the past couple of years, a succession of American tech executives have decamped to Beijing to pander to the dictatorial leadership there. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, has shown a penchant for flattering the ruling caste in China; he has repeatedly visited the country that his company,…

As the Trump administration seeks to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power, it will probably want to close the barn door as well, now that the horse has gotten out.

Had enough of theoretical arguments about free trade—of complaints by establishment Republicans and the business community that President Trump is leading us from the glorious era of free trade into a recession induced by his protectionist policies? Well here’s a tangible example that should help…

Donald Trump’s predictable unpredictability on Twitter has gone from a frustration to a mere annoyance for Capitol Hill, his cabinet, and his White House staff. Amazingly enough, Washington seems to have factored Trump’s tweets into the complex equation of how government works. But the president…

What did President Trump accomplish on his 12-day, 5-nation trip through East Asia? Not much, at least not substantively—and that’s judging by the president’s own remarks at the White House on Wednesday. Speaking to cameras and the press pool from the Diplomatic Room, the president provided a…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, senior writer Michael Warren talks with host Eric Felten about the president's speech detailing his trip to Asia.

When President Trump talks tough on trade to one or several of our “partners,” he is being rude and wrecking the world trading system—in the words of the New York Times, adopting a “starkly unilateralist approach.” Yet when he politely raises America’s problems with that system in private, praises…

They have come to Bonn, Germany, some 25,000 diplomats, scientists, and lobbyists from some 200 nations to put flesh on the bare bones of the climate agreement signed two years ago. That’s when members of the congregation, gathered in Paris, pledged to limit further global warming to 2 degrees…

After reports came out that President Donald Trump did not take questions during a press conference in China, several pundits, journalists, and former Obama administration officials criticized this decision.

More Election Day Fallout—The White House pushed back Wednesday on the conventional assessment that the Democratic wave election in Virginia and elsewhere reflected poorly on Donald Trump: The president’s party always faces “headwinds” in elections in the first year; Virginia was trending…

More Election Day Fallout—The White House pushed back Wednesday on the conventional assessment that the Democratic wave election in Virginia and elsewhere reflected poorly on Donald Trump: The president’s party always faces “headwinds” in elections in the first year; Virginia was trending…

During a rare appearance before Congress Wednesday, a high-ranking North Korean defector told lawmakers that the U.S. should focus on shaping the flow of information into North Korea and urging China not to repatriate defectors.

The operations of the U.S. military depend on space assets. Reconnaissance satellites allow us to find our adversaries; communications satellites allow us to coordinate movements against them; global positioning satellites allow us to direct our weaponry with unprecedented accuracy. In any…

Signs of China’s economic strength abound: from the increasing number of Hollywood movies that are designed to pander to Chinese tastes to the political class’s silence in the face of Chinese cyber-aggression. Consider the non-reaction to Beijing’s stunning plundering of OPM personnel data compared…

Whenever the vanguard of the Race’n’Gender Left™ meets the avant-garde of post-postmodern art, hilarity ensues. So it is with Omer Fast’s August, a recent installation in Manhattan’s Chinatown. If you’re wondering why an art show called August opened in September and will close in October, trust…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, frequent contributor Gordon Chang talks with host Eric Felten about Xi Jinping's opening speech at China's 19th Communist Party Congress.

Donald Trump may have played golf with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe earlier this year, but when Chinese president Xi Jinping made his own visit to Mar-a-Lago, a visit to the links was decidedly not on the agenda.

American trade policy is focused on steel, gasoline-powered cars, and coal; China’s is focused on robots, electric vehicles, and solar panels.

Communism had some good parts, and the New York Times is on it.

On his last day in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump held his final bilateral meeting of the week with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. It was the leaders’ first one-on-one meeting since Erdogan’s trip to Washington in May. Here’s how Trump introduced…

The forces driving North Korea’s nuclear weapons program are reminiscent of Cold War strategies pursued by the Soviet Union. Most notable was Moscow’s decision in the mid-1970s to deploy 243 SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) with three independently targetable warheads apiece and…

Many Americans, particularly on the right, have comforted themselves with the notion that fears of an oncoming Chinese century are overblown. Per capita incomes in China remain well below those in the capitalist West, and the country’s arguably irresponsible stimulus policies have led to a…

On Wednesday Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin doubled down on a threat from the president to stop trade with any country that does business with North Korea.

As presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised he would make really great deals that would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. “We will get our people off of welfare and back to work—rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor,” President Trump said in his…

Circuses feature sideshows and main events. So it is with the circus that performs daily at the Trump White House when it comes to trade policy. The sideshow currently on offer is the renegotiation of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that creates a more-or-less free trade area…

As presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised he would make really great deals that would bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. “We will get our people off of welfare and back to work—rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor,” President Trump said in his…

Athens

Athens

Liu Xiaobo, the literary critic, philosopher, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, died today at age 61. His death is an inestimable loss, and the circumstances cruel. Liu was serving an 11-year sentence for subversion for his role in Charter 08, a democracy manifesto and other writings critical of…

Liu Xiaobo’s deeply depressing death coincides with the long, slow demise of the cause he so bravely championed: Chinese liberalism.

Ting Xue, a committed Christian, is a refugee who fled from religious persecution in his native China. He now lives in Denver with his wife, a lawful permanent resident who likewise hails from China, and their young daughter. Xue has a job, pays taxes, and is active in a local evangelical church.…

Chinese president Xi Jinping is headed to the G20 meeting in Hamburg later this week planning to paint the town—no, not red—but green. Using President Trump’s decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate deal as an excuse, Xi will present himself as the new savior of the environment. As he…

The increasing repression being visited upon Hong Kong by Beijing is well documented. The Chinese regime is muddling in the city’s politics, which are supposed to be off limits. Beijing has also kidnapped several people from Hong Kong, even though the Chinese police legally have no jurisdiction…

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

Michael Warren is on vacation this week, and Andrew Egger is filling in for him on White House Watch. Michael will be back in the saddle on July 3.

President Donald Trump tweeted a somewhat cryptic message about China and North Korea on Tuesday: “While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!”

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the…

Tokyo

There is little doubt among economic forecasters that over the medium term, Asia's emerging economies—China and India foremost among them—are expected to drive global economic growth. Taken as one, the region from India to Japan is not only the biggest market for raw materials, energy, and the…

China may only be implementing sanctions against North Korea in fits and starts, but it has shown no trouble sanctioning its democratic neighbors, South Korea and Taiwan. South Korea, for the "crime" of trying to protect itself from North Korean missiles—Beijing loathes the THAAD missile defense…

It's almost as if Donald Trump "looked into Xi Jinping's soul" when the Chinese president visited Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago. What else can explain the U.S. president's bizarre affinity for the repressive Chinese dictator, which he laid out in a disturbing interview with Reuters on Thursday?

The innocuous-sounding Global Times is basically the id of the Chinese Communist party. A stridently nationalist tabloid newspaper with a flair for Breitbartian excess, the CCP-owned Times has, in recent weeks alone, referred to Australia as an "offshore prison," warned of a "large-sale war" should…

Last week's strike on the Syrian airfield from which Bashar al-Assad launched his latest chemical-weapons attack on his own people has somewhat overshadowed President Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping, the president of China. The summit at Mar-a-Lago last Thursday and Friday was the first chance for…

President Trump will meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping Thursday in what will be his most important and consequential meeting with a foreign leader so far. Not only does Xi lead a major regional and world power, with a population of nearly 1.4 billion and an economic output that competes with…

President Donald Trump has three big meetings this week with important world leaders. The first two come from the Middle East. On Monday, Trump will meet for several hours with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at the White House, followed by a Wednesday meeting with King Abdullah II of…

Seoul

In the final week of the Obama administration, the outgoing president filed a complaint at the World Trade Organization (WTO) accusing China of unfair trade practices. This wasn't a big surprise: Obama averaged one complaint against China every six months throughout his presidency. Indeed, Donald…

North Korea's apparent assassination of Kim Jong-un's exiled half-brother Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur's airport was many things: A hideously cruel act; a brazen act of international terrorism; and another sign of the paranoia of the young North Korean dictator.

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.

Donald Trump spoke on the phone Thursday night with his counterpart in China for the first time since being inaugurated—and for the first time since Trump accepted a phone call from the president of Taiwan late last year. The Taiwan call, which took place in early December when Trump was still the…

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.

It is the exorbitant privilege of the United States that it can conjure the world's primary reserve currency, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then French finance minister and later president, remarked half a century ago. This privilege, maintained as the dollar took the place of gold, allows the United…

It is the exorbitant privilege of the United States that it can conjure the world’s primary reserve currency, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then French finance minister and later president, remarked half a century ago. This privilege, maintained as the dollar took the place of gold, allows the United…

The Gideon Bible it isn't. At a chain of mid-tier hotels in Japan—roughly equivalent to the Holiday Inn—guests are treated to another form of bedtime reading. Each room includes a book, penned by the chain's founder and CEO, that claims, among other things, that the Nanjing Massacre was "fabricated…

Writing in the Wealth of Nations in 1776, Adam Smith stated that, "corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity (sic)." Faced with a growing population and flattening agricultural productivity, essentially what Smith was pointing out was the world needed more corn and less silver.

For those who will miss the fawning tone and tenor of presidential news coverage to which we have grown accustomed in the age of Obama, there’s always Chinese media and its coverage of the Communist party and its leaders.

In 1992, in anticipation of the 1997 reversion of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to communist Chinese rule, the United States Congress enacted the U.S.-Hong Kong Policy Act. The act made the findings that "the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China,…

'Tis the season to be jolly. And for governments to show their concern for the governed, not all of whom have granted their consent to be governed by the in-crowd.

CNN reports:

This was not your typical film premiere. The Bleeding Edge depicts the live-organ harvesting of religious dissidents by agents of the Chinese government and its reigning Communist Party—and the film's starring actress, human-rights activist and religious dissident Anastasia Lin was allegedly almost…

China continues to seeth over Donald Trump's overtures to Taiwan. First, there was in the phone call between Trump and Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. Now, the Washington Post reports:

Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for a phone call. That's how it must have felt to the Taiwanese people when their president, Tsai Ing-wen, had a 10-minute talk with Donald Trump on December 2—the first direct conversation between a Taiwanese leader and a U.S. president or president-elect…

Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for a phone call. That’s how it must have felt to the Taiwanese people when their president, Tsai Ing-wen, had a 10-minute talk with Donald Trump on December 2—the first direct conversation between a Taiwanese leader and a U.S. president or president-elect…

Donald Trump will name Iowa governor Terry Branstad his ambassador to China, reports Bloomberg. Here's the story:

Did Donald Trump just set the stage for World War III?

2016 had been a tough year for Taiwan, the jewel of an island nation that China views as an illegitimate breakaway province. In January, it elected a new president–a progressive female law professor who takes a decidedly dim view of the Communist tyranny a few hundred miles from Taiwan's shores.…

On Friday, Donald Trump became the first president-elect to speak to the leader of Taiwan since 1979. As the Financial Times notes, Trump's call could anger the Communist Chinese regime in Beijing:

Since 1992, even before the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, U.S. policy has been based on the premise that Beijing's Communist leaders value Hong Kong's autonomy. The theory was that Beijing would not want to damage Hong Kong and so could be relied upon not to undermine Hong Kong's…

Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at askmattlabash@gmail.com or click here.

Venezuela. Algeria. Russia. Even Saudi Arabia. These are countries that always seem to top the list when we consider who was hurt the most economically by OPEC's multi-year price war on oil. In 2014, when OPEC countries opened the petroleum floodgates in an attempt to break the U.S. fracking…

Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen's National Day address—Monday marks the 105th birthday of the Republic of China—was remarkable in the issues that it foregrounded. What was notable, in fact, was how utterly quotidian Taiwan's first female leader's remarks were. The large majority of the recently…

Urumqi, China

Here's an interesting stat brought to you by Ana Swanson of the Washington Post: "A survey of 33 Japanese restaurants in the Washington area revealed that 12 were owned by Chinese Americans and 12 by Korean Americans. Only six were Japanese owned." And it's not just in the Washington area, mind…

"Great power competition” has just become a phrase that the Pentagon is forbidden to use when speaking of the People's Republic of China and the United States. The order was conveyed in the last few weeks by the White House in a classified document the contents of which were disclosed to the Navy…

It may seem like a minor, technical issue, but it became clear to me on a visit to Taipei earlier this month that the Taiwanese government was furious that it might be blocked from even observing the triennial meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which is just getting…

Taibo City, Taiwan

Donald Trump likes dictators and likes to be liked by them. After meeting Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last week, Trump called Sisi "a fantastic guy," gushing, "he took control of Egypt. And he really took control of it." Trump approves of the unprecedented repression that followed Sisi's…

Taibo City, Taiwan

Hong Kong

The death of Islam Karimov, the 78-year old party boss and dictatorial president of Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistan, a key strategic power in Central Asia, was announced September 2 in official Uzbek media. The cause of his demise was reported to be a stroke, and rumors of it had circulated for…

President Obama will tolerate a lot for an opportunity to push his climate-change agenda. At this weekend's G20 summit meeting of the world's developed (aka "rich") nations, which account for 85 percent of the world's economy, his Chinese hosts really poured on the humiliation.

The Met museum in Manhattan has turned a large part of its Asian art floors over to a temporary exhibition of all the finest Chinese paintings from its vaults: "Masterpieces of Chinese Painting From the Metropolitan Collection" will be on until October 11.

A couple of years ago, THE WEEKLY STANDARD noted that American business interests and the media cover up China's human rights abuses. It contains this anecdote, which seems relevant in light of the recent and long overdue scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation:

The level of fury expressed by Beijing over South Korea's recently announced decision to deploy the U.S. Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD) seems to have caught some in Seoul off guard. China's official mouthpiece, Xinhua, even carried an August 13 report suggesting that…

Given Donald Trump's penchant for bashing all thing China—or even his obvious relish in enunciating the country's name—one might expect Beijing to worry about the prospect of the real estate mogul rising to the presidency. And yet, there are also reasons to believe that China would welcome a Trump…

The July 28 announcement that Beijing and Moscow will be carrying out "routine" joint naval exercises in the South China Sea in September is merely the latest indication that Beijing is firmly digging in its heels on its maritime territorial claims. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson told a…

All of the hubbub over the Permanent Court of Arbitration's July 12 ruling that left China's "nine-dash line" in tatters and raised questions anew about Beijing's ability to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international arena overlooked one vital factor: There's a new sheriff in town in…

What happens when a major global power—one that will soon boast the world's largest economy to boot—refuses to accept legally "binding" arbitration decisions? We're about to find out.

China has a well-known problem with cyber-theft and with taking five-finger discounts on other peoples’ intellectual property. Their new fighter jet is our new fighter jet, the design and technical details of which they stole. Their new predator drone is our predator drone, which they stole. Their…

Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew are in China for two days of talks on a variety of issues with his Chinese counterparts. In his opening remarks for the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, Kerry said the Americans and the Chinese are increasingly anxious…

The International Monetary Fund designated China’s yuan—also called renminbi (RMB), or "People's Currency"—an IMF-accepted reserve currency in November. So holdings of yuan (along with previously designated holdings of dollars, euros, yen, and sterling) enable IMF-members to access special drawing…

Once upon a time in America, a state-sponsored healthcare exchange used a multi-hour Richard Simmons dance party to promote insurance coverage to young people. Somehow this is not the worst marketing ploy to youth a government has used in the last three years.

Donald Trump, who has never ever gone personally bankrupt, has a plan to attack our mounting national debt: stiff creditors.

Harry Wu, the former Chinese political prisoner died Tuesday at 79. In the 1990s, Mr. Wu used his personal experiences and research to bring the matter of forced labor—and the products they exported to the West—into the then vigorous American debate over human rights in China. Thanks to Mr. Wu, the…

After a big win in his home state of New York, three of Donald Trump's children joined Fox News's Sean Hannity for an interview. Donald Trump Junior went on a rant after being asked a question by Hannity on Team Trump's inability to secure delegates.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited major state and Communist party media outlets in February, where he demanded “absolute loyalty."

Astoundingly, 40 years after his death, China still celebrates Mao Zedong. He lies permanently preserved in Tiananmen Square and is honored annually by hundreds of thousands of Chinese visitors who come to pay their respects.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is nothing if not consistent. His incompetent (and unremittingly cruel) leadership extends not only to his miserable domestic record. Kim is proving to be a disaster on the international scene as well.

The Great Wall of China, often cited as the ultimate measure of border security, was not, in fact, all that effective. Just ask Kublai Khan and his Mongol hordes who rode south through the original Great Wall fortifications to establish the Yuan Dynasty in 1279.

Just hours before President Xi Jinping's arrival in Prague on Monday for the first state visit by China's head of state to the Czech Republic, his host, President Miloš Zeman, gave a curious interview to Beijing's state broadcaster, CCTV. He called the impending visit "a restart" for Czech-Chinese…

Donald Trump has undeniably brought the issue of trade with China to the national stage. With Trump's good odds at becoming the GOP nominee, down-ballot candidates in the House and the Senate are indeed having to grapple with a changed landscape.

This morning, as the White House welcomed Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, the White House passed out American and Canadian flags to guests on the South Lawn.

China may still lag far behind the United States in total gross domestic product, but that's not how most Americans see it. According to a new Gallup survey, fully 50 percent of Americans view China as the world's leading economic power; only 37 percent of respondents think of the United States as…

China chose the perfect moment to indicate how little regard it has for the Obama Administration's vaunted "pivot" to Asia. Just as President Obama held the first-ever summit on American soil with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders last month, Beijing deployed surface-to-air…

In 1989, I lived a block away from the embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Washington, D.C. It sat on Connecticut Avenue, a major thoroughfare that runs from the White House past the city limits. In the spring of that year, as pro-democracy protests swelled in Beijing, crowds of Chinese…

Last week, the United States Senate unanimously passed a bill to rename the street that the Chinese embassy sits on in Washington from International Place to Liu Xiaobo Plaza. Liu, of course, is the dissident Chinese intellectual who has been imprisoned since 2008 for signing the pro-democracy…

As tensions in Asia, particularly in and around the South and East China Seas, have steadily risen in the past eight years, Taiwan has emerged as an island of unexpected tranquility. The thaw in cross-Strait relations brought about by the era of the Nationalist (KMT) presidency of Taiwan’s Ma…

2015 was a bad year for Warren Buffett, oil and natural gas producers, U.S. coal companies, taxicab companies and their lenders, currency traders who thought the yuan could only go up, the New York Giants, Marissa Mayer, university administrators, and Trump haters.

Chinese internet giant Alibaba's purchase of one of Asia's great newspapers, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP), should be a cause for concern for all who value an independent press. While Alibaba executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai claimed that the company would continue to allow the SCMP…

President Obama is in Paris for a conference on climate change. Today he met with the leader of China, President Xi Jinping, and discussed the importance of the U.S.-China relationship in regards to fighting climate change.

From Hong Kong to Harvard, erasing history has become a necessity. In the Chinese territory, it is the authorities in Beijing who want to eliminate any memory of the past; in Harvard Square, it is the Law School students. In Hong Kong, memories of its colonial past cannot be missed: the harbor and…

Last week, while Americans were watching the World Series and John Harwood’s presidential debate buffoonery, the Chinese government did something interesting: It killed the one-child policy. 

In the last 20 years, America’s political, media, and business establishments have done their best to rehabilitate the image of China’s Communist government. After all, there’s a lot of money to be made by playing nice with China and looking the other way when Beijing continues to routinely commit…

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…

Jilted. That’s how policy makers here in America feel now that British Prime Minister David Cameron has dubbed his country’s relation with the People’s Republic of China as “a very special relationship”, trumping the merely “special relationship”, the term used by Winston Churchill in 1946 to…

China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of…

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on October 7 that “the only concern” Beijing has regarding the October 16 White House summit between President Obama and South Korean President Park Geun-hye is a possible discussion of “deployment of the THAAD missile defense system in the South.” Yonhap…

The ACLU's website reports on how China's communist government is working with some of the country's biggest corporations to insitute an Orwellian system to "score" every citizen:

In a newly released Hillary Clinton email, Clinton jokes that the Chinese must have hacked her email. "Even weirder--I just checked and I do have your state but not your gmail--so how did that happen. Must be the Chinese!"

Today at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, Bill Clinton claimed he tried to be more Chinese by saving money. Watch:

Last month, China devalued its currency, slightly lowering the bottom of the range within which market forces can determine the yuan’s foreign exchange value. The central bank’s announcement triggered severe repercussions in global financial markets—but it was inaccurate and incomplete.

Two distinguished politicians, one with a constituency of over one billion souls, the other a constituency of over one billion subjects, visited us this week. The pope’s souls, of course, are voluntary adherents to his cause, with the price of disobedience deferred until the disobedient enter…

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in scheduling his U.S. visit, seems to have fallen into a trap common for many communist leaders: underestimating papal power. Xi will be following in the footsteps of Pope Francis on visits first to the White House in Washington, and then to the United Nations in New…

En route to Friday’s state dinner in his honor, Chinese President Xi Jinping stopped off in Seattle to meet with the heads of America’s great technology firms, from which China denies regularly stealing $300 billion annually in intellectual property, according to the Wall Street Journal. His goal:…

Warren Buffett had it right, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” Peer through the fog of commentary on recent share price gyrations and you can see the unclothed figures of Chinese president Xi Jinping and his fellow managers of the Chinese economy, the very one…

The plunge in U.S. stock markets, along with various bourses around the world, is a result of fears that whatever is happening in China is a portent of worse things to come, and that what happens in China is contagious. Whether that is true is difficult to discern, however: We don’t have any…

John Kerry’s visit to Asia this week – like Ashton Carter’s last month – is designed to offer reassurance that America’s commitment to the region remains unwavering in the face of increased Chinese aggression. Yet despite these visits, leaders in the region have profound doubts whether the United…

If Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, Carl Icahn may be his ambassador or chief negotiator to China. Trump made the revelation in an interview this morning on MSNBC:

Donald Trump, to borrow a phrase, is “dead to me.” Well, not exactly, but in a radio interview Wednesday with a San Francisco-based nutritionist, Trump did indulge in one of modern politicians’ most irritating habits: praising the airports in developing countries like China, and lamenting the…

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a Republican candidate for president, will address the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, on Monday evening on her foreign policy outlook. In her speech, Fiorina will discuss how as president she would broker a "new deal" with…

Conservatives of America, unite. You have nothing to lose but regulations and subsidies. Hark. Listen up. Pay attention. And if there is any other cliché that might get your attention, pencil it in.

Secretary of State John Kerry defended the Obama administration's decision to take the Iran deal to the United Nations before the U.S. Congress votes on it. Kerry made the remarks in an interview this morning on ABC News:

Even in the context of China’s steadily deteriorating human rights situation, the developments of the last few weeks have been remarkable. 

More than 20 million Americans had their privacy violated in the recent hack.  This according to a story in the New York Times, which reports that:

Bill Kristol appeared with Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV Tuesday to discuss Donald Trump's influence on the Republican presidential field. The boss argued that despite Trump's inappropriate comments about illegal immigrants, Republicans should not be so quick to disregard the issues the real-estate…

The World Bank last week removed a chapter of its latest report on China, saying it had not been properly reviewed. It seems that the chapter, “Special Topic: Reform Priorities in China’s Financial Sector” called China’s financial sector wasteful, poor performing, overly indebted and weakly…

China’s foreign aid programs are distinguished by size (much larger than those of other countries), breadth (encompassing 92 emerging-market countries in six geographic regions), and composition (focused on mining and exports of natural resources and supporting infrastructure). They are also unique…

South Korean President Park Geun-hye may have avoided walking into a potential minefield in postponing her recent Washington visit due to the MERS outbreak in her home country. Following the highly successful Washington visit of Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, there is a growing sense of “Korea…

Earlier this month, the G7 met in Bavaria; its seven members are the major European and North American economies, plus Japan. The G7 is the successor to the G8—Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been suspended, having invaded and annexed parts of Ukraine, and now actively making mischief on NATO’s Baltic…

President Obama met with China’s Special Representatives to the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and Consultation on People-to-People Exchange earlier today, according to the White House. A topic of discussion? America's cyber concerns.

In at least one respect, visiting China is a little bit like traveling back in time to America in, say, 1957. (Or so I gather.) That is, people routinely smoke cigarettes in shopping malls, elevators, lines, apartment building hallways, schools, and yes, even hospitals. (Oh, and of course bars and…