Who’s After Hu? Hu?

Dr Watson: Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Sherlock Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Watson: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes: That was the curious incident.
So it was with the recently concluded fourth plenary session of the Party’s 17th Central Committee. Xi Jinping, [...]

Detention Of Rio Execs May Signal Shift In China’s Economic Security Policy

In any commercial negotiation, intelligence about the other side’s intentions is invaluable. At some point gathering information becomes corporate espionage. Where the line between the two is drawn is rarely clear, and in China, perhaps, murkier than in most places, and more a political than legal decision.
The detention without charge of Rio Tinto’s chief iron-ore [...]

Hu Heads Home To Restore Party Credibility

President Hu Jintao’s return to China, cutting short his attendance at the G8 meeting in Italy, reinforces how seriously the Party leadership takes the challenge to its credibility caused by the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang.
Security forces will be able to reassert control, if not necessarily peace, in Urumqi, but the risk of further outbreaks there [...]

30 Years Of Opening Up To The World

It is 30 years to the day that the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Communist Party of China Central Committee opened, a meeting that would usher in the opening of China under Deng Xiaoping and see the closing of the unhappy chapter of China’s history that was the Cultural Revolution.
It may be difficult for [...]

China, Cuba, Russia and Latin America

Not that he is likely to foreclose but Hu Jintao has some debt restructuring to do with Raul Castro. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, China kept Cuba afloat with soft loans. Many of those are now falling due. Renegotiating them is on the agenda of the Cuba leg of Hu’s Latin [...]

Spacewalks, Milestones and the Party Plenum

It was shorter than expected, 13 mins, but a spacewalk nonetheless, and the latest milestone in China’s fast advancing space program.
Astronaut Zhai Zhigang, floated out of Shenzhou 7’s orbital module on Saturday afternoon, and at one point waved a Chinese flag. Xinhua has lots of coverage, including pictures of Zhai and flag (How do you [...]

Hu Meets Foreign Journalists

President Hu Jintao doesn’t give many press conferences. So his 70-minute meeting with a handful of foreign journalists in Beijing was highly unusual. A rare sighting for both sides of a little understood breed.
Hu appealed to the journalists not to politicize the Olympic Games due to open in Beijing little over a week. Nothing much [...]

Hu Reins In The Press

The reining in of the press evident in recent weeks has become formal.
Domestic media have been ordered to “earnestly study and implement” a recent speech by President Hu Jintao in which he said the primary task of the news media is to guide public opinion correctly, to benefit the party, the nation and the people, [...]

Hu In Japan, Olympic Torch in Shenzhen

The events-of-consequence side of me feels I should be noting the progress in Sino-Japanese relations being brought by President Hu Jintao’s visit to Japan: agreement to an annual summit and generally being good eggs with each other, even though the dispute over gas in the East China Sea remains unresolved. China Economic Review has a [...]

Hu Visits Tokyo To Mend Fences

President Hu Jintao’s state visit to Japan will last longer, five days, than any other he has undertaken. While this will be a trip more about symbolism than substance, its length is a sign of the importance that Beijing now attaches to repairing its long fractious relationship with Tokyo.
Relations between the two countries have been [...]