In The News

Exchange of Empires

Timothy Garton Ash May 20, 2005
Recognized internationally as a part of Moldova, the para-state of Transnistria highlights a unique dilemma for the European Union. A microcosm of the former Soviet Union at first glance, this narrow region on the east bank of the Dniestr River is a fusion of communist and Western cultures, a symbolic representation of the decline of the Russian empire. Since 1992, Transnistria has won de facto...

Business: A Jack Welch of Communists

Sarah Schafer May 3, 2005
While China is already a world economic powerhouse, it has produced virtually no global companies. Haier, arguably China's most respected business leader, aims to change this. With over US$10 million in debt in the early 1980s, the firm started from humbled beginnings. Today, though, Haier is one of the world's top five producers of household appliances, with 30,000 employees and more...

Rising Dragon and the American Eagle – Part I

David Shambaugh April 20, 2005
Recent developments – including the high-profile visit by China's premier Wen Jiabao to South Asia – showing the rising profile of China have intensified a long-running debate in Washington. How does the growing power and influence of China affect the dominance that the United States has so far enjoyed in Asia? In the first of our two-part series, George Washington University's China...

Crouching Tiger, Swimming Dragon

Nayan Chanda April 11, 2005
Nearly six hundred years after Chinese ships visited the Persian Gulf, the ground is being laid again for a permanent Chinese presence in the area through which some 40 percent of the world's oil resources travel. As Nayan Chanda writes, Chinese diplomatic visit to Pakistan last week resulted in an agreement to expand a Chinese-built port there, leaving US, Japanese, and Indian governments...

Russia's Neighbors

Vladimir Radyuhin April 7, 2005
As optimists salute democracy's march in the Middle East, so too do they point towards the former republics of the Soviet Union, where a spate of "democratic" revolutions has toppled three Russian-backed governments. Georgia, Ukraine, and now Kyrgyzstan have all undergone sweeping regime changes. But Russian analysts, like Vladimir Radyuhin, are cautious in their appraisals of such...

La liberation d’un prisonnier ne prefigure pas un repit au Xinjiang

Dru C. Gladney March 30, 2005

Prisoner's Release Does Not Herald a Xinjiang Spring

Dru C. Gladney March 30, 2005
The recent release of a Uyghur businesswoman from a Chinese prison may have appeased the visiting US Secretary of State, but the gesture also underscored the continual frictions between China and its Uyghur ethnic minority. Beijing's official stance is that Muslim Uyghurs separatists pose a terrorist threat, but as Dru C. Gladney suggests, this may actually be a case of so-called "...