It’s time for Western universities to close their Confucius Institutes and end their academic cooperation with China. In the three decades following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, one of the ways China sought to rebuild its image abroad was by systematically forging partnerships with Western universities. At first, these partnerships mainly focused on research collaboration. Read more
When I was 18, I arrived in Beijing, found my luggage had been lost in Karachi and, needing a change of clothes, bought a T-shirt that said: “You are not a real man if you have not climbed the Great Wall of China.” In subsequent years I not only walked along various parts of the Read more
Christian churches in China have been ordered to take down displays of the Ten Commandments and replace them with quotes from Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to reports. According to Bitter Winter, a magazine covering religious liberty and human rights in China, churches belonging to the country’s state-run “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” Protestant denomination have been Read more
The latest verbal sparring between Rome and Beijing could be preliminary moves in which both sides establish the ground rules for future relations. Last week, Pope Francis called on Chinese Catholics to attach themselves to “the rock of Peter on which the Church was built”. This means giving allegiance to Rome, rather than the government-sanctioned Read more