Editor’s note for Friday, June 19, 2020

Dear Access member,

The two Candians behind bars in China are in trouble, for all the wrong reasons, see Story 1 below.

The Chinese government’s propaganda apparti are stepping up their defence of policies in Xinjiang that have resulted in the detention of a million or more Uyghurs: See this slick piece of agitprop from China’s global “news” network CGTN: Memories of fighting terrorism in Xinjiang.

The border dispute at the India-China border is not going to simply disappear with nice words from both countries’ foreign ministries. The founder of Indian news website The Print, Shekhar Gupta, tweeted:

I was five in 1962. It took five decades after that to get India’s new generations to trust China. That trust won’t return for decades now. And never if a regime like CPC is in power. What visionary Deng started with Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, has been fully reversed by Xi.

Foreign affairs correspondent at The Hindu, Ananth Krishnan, commented: 

Something to ponder, the next time you read in an op-ed how the Chinese are “long term strategic thinkers” who “think decades in advance”. Do the actions of the past week sound like “long term” strategic thinking?

June 25: A free The China Project CEO webinar: The post-COVID consumer in China and the rest of the world — an early readout: Hear from Yale Senior Fellow Stephen Roach and Co-CEO of L Catterton Michael Chu as they discuss what the post-COVID consumer will look like.

Our word of the day is Canadian person 加拿大人 jiānádà rén.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief