Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com While President and commander-in-chief Xi Jinping is generally credited with boosting China’s global profile, chinks in the armor of China’s aggressive foreign policy have also become obvious. Supremo Xi was so wrapped up with the “strategic partnership” he put together with the disgraced president Viktor Yanukovych that he […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com President Xi Jinping has made progress in his long-cherished goal of starting political or “reunification” talks with Taiwan, which would eventually lead to some form of political union between the two political entities on either side of the Taiwan Strait. Xi earlier this week met in Beijing with […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com The Chinese Communist Party is implementing a new cycle of “strike hard” campaign to exterminate what Chinese ethnic-affairs cadres call the “cancer cells” of separatism, ethnic radicalism and religious extremism that appear to be spreading in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XAR). Since April 2013, riots and disturbances, including […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com Beijing has announced the line-up of a super-agency charged with overseeing the directions of economic reform. President Xi Jinping, who is already in charge of party and foreign affairs in addition the army and the police, has been appointed the Head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Leading Group […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave the Chinese leadership a much-appreciated Christmas present when he unexpectedly paid a formal visit to the Yasukuni Shrine — where 14 Class-A WWII criminals are honored — on Dec. 26. Abe’s perceived support of quasi-militaristic goals has elicited a tidal wave of […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com After taking tough measures to silence dissidents and clamp down on the Internet, President Xi Jinping was supposed to have given his blessings to economic reform in the just-ended Central Economic Work Meeting, whose function is to provide a road map for financial and fiscal policies for 2014. […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com China is set to mark a watershed in the global space race by putting a “rover” on the moon that is capable of doing complicated experiments on rugged terrain. The state-of-the-art vehicle, called Jade Rabbit, landed on the moon over the weekend. Yet what is less well-known is […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com Beijing’s designation of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that partially overlaps with that of Japan and South Korea has raised alarms throughout the Asia-Pacific Region. While attention has focused on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership’s immediate goal of securing de facto control over the Diaoyu-Senkaku islands […]
Special to WorldTribune.com By Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com President Xi Jinping is emerging as China’s undisputed strongman even as whatever little that has remained of the institutional reforms championed by late leader Deng Xiaoping has become increasingly attenuated. Having been a principal victim of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) spearheaded by dictator Mao Zedong, Deng quickly put […]
Special to WorldTribune.com Willy Lam, East-Asia-Intel.com Perhaps the best comment on the just-ended plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee was made by the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock markets, which dropped respectively 1.83 percent and 1.91 percent on Wednesday, Nov. 13. While the communique published after the four-day enclave pronounced that […]