by Amy Zegart quoting Michael Spence via The Atlantic
Thirty years ago this week, I watched the news from Beijing and started shredding my bedding. It was the night before my college graduation, I had been studying Chinese politics, and news had broken that college students just like us had been gunned down in Tiananmen Square after weeks of peaceful and exhilarating democracy protests—carried on international TV. In the iconic square where Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People’s Republic decades before, bespectacled students from China’s best universities had camped out, putting up posters with slogans of freedom in Chinese and English. A “goddess of democracy” figure modeled after the Statue of Liberty embodied their hopes—and ours—for political liberation in China.
A policy of moderation through economic seduction was delusional, but a shift to economic coercion without emphasizing human rights will be just as ineffective.
China Increases Construction Rate of Amphibs
By Andrew Tate, IHS Jane's 360: “The eighth Type 071 (Yuzhao)-class amphibious assault ship on order for China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) was launched at the Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard in Shanghai on 6 June, making it the fourth of these 20,000 tonne landing platform dock (LPD) vessels to have entered the water since June 2017."
interview with Victor Davis Hanson via Hillsdale College
Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson discusses China.
featuring Elizabeth Economy via City-Journal
Elizabeth Economy offers a penetrating look at Xi Jinping’s aggressively antidemocratic regime.
Derek Scissors | Senate Committee on Finance Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness
The Belt and Road Initiative as a whole has become a red herring.