Special to WorldTribune.com by Geostrategy-Direct China has launched a new cyber warfare unit tasked with targeting Southeast Asian nations and solidifying Beijing’s political and military dominance in the South China Sea. The new cyber unit of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was identified as Unit 78020 and is based in Kunming, in Yunnan Province, according to […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com Just before China’s Army Day on Aug. 1, President and Central Military Commission (CMC) Chairman Xi Jinping elevated ten senior People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers to full generals. This was Xi’s most significant military move since the formal arrest of Gen. Guo Boxiong, the former Politburo member and […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com The announcement on July 20 of the arrest of top cadre Ling Jihua could mark at least a temporary moratorium in President Xi Jinping’s three-year-old campaign on corruption among senior officials. It also demonstrates that despite Xi’s repeated rhetorical commitment to “rule of law with Chinese characteristics,” the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com The Xi Jinping administration has rolled out a National Security Law which exposes its paranoia about threats to political stability on the one hand, and Beijing’s overarching ambitions about achieving superpower status, on the other. The Law puts safeguarding “regime security” ahead of ensuring that “sovereignty, national unity, […]
Sol W. Sanders As the Chinese and the Americans sat down for the seventh of their annual two-day meeting [June 22-24], set up in 2009 to maintain bilateral cooperation despite growing differences, a major transformation of the Chinese regime was a new and worrying factor. Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com Much of the discussion of the People’s Liberation Army’s just-released White Paper — China’s Military Strategy — has focused on a leap forward in China’s global hard-power projection, particularly new emphasis being put on enhanced naval, space and cyberwarfare capacities. Equally important for the long-term development of the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com China’s momentous “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) strategy — a reference to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road — has further illustrated the declining political fortunes of Premier Li Keqiang. Although Li is ranked second on the supreme Chinese Communist Party Politburo […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com Chinese President Xi Jinping has formalized his country’s quasi-alliance relationship with Russia by his high-profile participation in counterpart Vladimir Putin’s celebration of the 70th anniversary of the “defeat of Nazism in WWII.” For the first time ever, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) honor guard took part in the […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com President Xi Jinping has invited Eric Chu, Chairman of Taiwan’s Kuomintang (KMT, or the Nationalists) Party for a “historic handshake” in Beijing early next month on May 4. This will be the second time since 1949 that the heads of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the KMT […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, EastAsiaIntel.com A leaked internal document of the Communist Youth League (CYL) – the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – has exposed plans by Chinese authorities to recruit more than 10 million “volunteers” to sensitize the country’s information superhighways. The document, which was reported in the Hong […]