While Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials met for their annual two sessions, discussing the upcoming economic Five-Year Plan, international coverage routinely described the National People’s Congress (NPC) as a “rubber stamp” parliament. The characterization of a parliament with no substantive role fits broadly with the notion that legal processes in China are but a performative…

By comparison with the Sino-Australian political downturn from 2016, the development of bilateral economic ties has generally improved across these years. To some extent, Sino-Australian economic cooperation can be regarded as the cornerstone of their bilateral relations. That said, it is interesting to ask what is the nexus between political relations and trade? Do poor…

Talk about China’s predatory behavior has echoed insistently in the halls of the White House. The Communist Party under President Xi Jinping is more aggressive and coercive, yet has a veneer of approachability and humility. It is a foreign policy projection that is as intriguing as it is unstable and dangerous. With continuing racial targeting…

Last month, Twitter unveiled Birdwatch, a fact-checking feature aimed at inoculating citizens against misinformation through a novel experiment in classic crowdsourcing. Twitter’s new initiative has a proactive and sparkling appeal, but there are prominent cracks in its foundation and ‘community-based’ approach to fact-checking. Birdwatch aims to crowdsource the fact-checking process, taking cues from the model…

Amidst the mammoth article inventories of think tanks and geopolitical institutes, one can quickly find writings tackling almost any global issue. The most constructive of these proposals offer tangible strategies with which governments may pursue a variety of foreign policy objectives and it is here where the most cunning, successful strategists apply one of the…

Handling a nuclear-armed Russia is like playing a game of chess. It is rarely void of faultless moves: each player carries the consequences of difficult decisions. It is emphatically a game of risk, but what it takes to win is unclear in this case.  While the fall of the Berlin Wall saw politicians shelving nuclear…

Western vaccines have made headlines across the world with Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna leading the way. Yet their Chinese counterparts have gone largely unnoticed. There are four main producers working on five separate vaccines in China who all face the same issue: that China, using swift and strict lockdowns, among other measures, has effectively dealt with…