Cindy Yu is the broadcast editor of the London-based Spectator magazine, one of the U.K.’s most venerable current affairs publications. We chatted about her work there, the beginning and end of the Sino-British ‘golden era,’ drinking culture, and much more.
“We don’t want COVID tests. We want to eat,” was one of the sentences scrawled in red on a banner hung off a bridge in Beijing just days before the Party Congress. The act of protest is rare in China, a country that is notorious for its censorship, and this lonely act of defiance will probably not be repeated any time soon.
“You’d think people would have learned their lesson after watching Xi Jinping emerge as one of the most conservative, ideological leaders of China in decades,” writes Myth of Chinese Capitalism author Dexter Tiff Roberts: “I certainly learned mine.”
In this week’s Russia-China update: The PRC demonstrates more “pro-Russia neutrality,” and Elon Musk says Beijing pressured him to drop Starlink coverage for Ukraine.
Sue-Lin Wong, who until recently covered China for the Economist, talks about her podcast series all about Xi Jinping — including interviews with a wide range of China-watchers, dissidents, and many others who offer insights into what makes Xi, Xi.
Zuri Linetsky, a research fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation, draws on a recent survey to explain how Americans think about U.S. foreign policy towards China.
Noah Barkin, managing editor at the Rhodium Group, discusses Olaf Scholz’s planned trip to China in November, and murmurs among EU officials that Beijing has shifted its tone on Russia.
A raft of new measures by the Biden administration will severely limit the amount of access Chinese firms have to American semiconductors (and the things that go into making them), dealing a blow to Beijing’s push to develop cutting-edge technologies at home.
Kecheng Fang, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong, talks about the often for-profit enterprises churning out nationalistic media content that Chinese people are consuming.