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Articles
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From a local and an expat, two stories of Hong Kong — and similar worries
China’s communist authorities in Beijing and their handpicked leaders in Hong Kong have been busy lately trying to rewrite the recent tumultuous history of this former British colony turned Chinese “special administrative region.” …
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From Beijing 2008 to Beijing 2022: fourteen years and a world of difference
When China last hosted the Olympics, in the summer of 2008, the country was a vastly different place. The Beijing 2008 Summer Games was China’s coming-out party to the world. Less than two decades after People’s Liberation Army troops crushed pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square, China was eager to show the world how much it…
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The best novels set in Africa about journalists, diplomats, and spies
I’ve been a journalist since high school and I spent 33 years as a reporter for The Washington Post, mostly as a foreign correspondent based in Asia, Africa, and Paris. My book Out Of America chronicled my three years as a correspondent in Africa during some of its most tumultuous events, the Somalia intervention, and…
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Opinion – There are two Hong Kongs. China is betting one can survive without the other.
Hong Kong now is increasingly a story of two cities occupying the same compact space, but existing in parallel realities. One Hong Kong is populated by bankers and financial services professionals, real estate developers and property owners, and businesspersons whose primary pursuit is trade with mainland China. In this universe, times are good and getting…
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Opinion – America tried nation-building in Afghanistan — but never committed to it
The United States went into Afghanistan to avenge the 9/11 attacks. We stayed promising to rebuild the country — with President George W. Bush invoking, in 2002, “the best traditions of George Marshall” and then-Sen. Barack Obama, in 2008, calling on Americans to “heed Marshall’s lesson” — even as both leaders took pains to avoid…
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Beijing’s cancel culture is crushing Hong Kong
In its efforts to remake Hong Kong into a city in its own image, the Chinese Communist Party has created a new security apparatus and court system to enforce new national security laws. CCP authorities have forced civil servants to take loyalty oaths. They are overhauling the education system to weed out Western-inspired ‘liberal studies’…
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The Vanishing Hong Kong: China’s Latest Casualty
AMERICAN CONSEQUENCES – Hong Kong’s handover from British to Chinese sovereignty came at midnight on July 1, 1997. But China’s makeover of Hong Kong began exactly 23 years later, midnight July 1, 2020.
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Trump talked the talk, but Biden may prove tougher on China
THE STRATEGIST – Is President-elect Joe Biden’s administration set to go soft on China? That seems to be the view of officials in outgoing President Donald Trump’s administration, who in recent days and weeks have been implementing a flurry of rule changes and policy pronouncements aimed at tying Biden’s hands on China. In rapid succession,…