What better way to symbolize the debate about the growing estrangement between the People’s Republic and foreign countries than by China’s chief epidemiologist’s recommendation to avoid physical contact with foreigners? It seems that decades of fighting for China’s friendship have been for naught when we are so categorically classified as a health risk.Friendship is already […]
These are busy times for Chen Xu, China’s envoy in Geneva. The permanent representative of the People’s Republic at the headquarters of the UN Human Rights Council is doing everything in his power these days to prevent a possible resolution against the People’s Republic. And he will probably be successful. However, the signs at the […]
The wrangling over the planned acquisition of a minority stake by the Chinese shipping company Cosco in one of the three container terminals in the German port of Hamburg is a prime example of the new vigilance of German politicians. Chinese is no longer being taken without hesitation, no matter how tempting it may be.A […]
The Chinese Academy of Historical Research (CAHR) stirred up controversy in late August. It shared a post on social media that focused on the foreign policy of the Ming and Qing dynasties. At that time, the Chinese emperors had decreed a political, economic and cultural distance to foreign countries for centuries, which gave China the […]
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report on the situation in the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang creates a stir in Germany. The German Foreign Office called on the Chinese government to immediately release the detained Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minorities and to “immediately grant all people in Xinjiang their full human […]
In the final minutes of her term, Michelle Bachelet delivered after all. On her last day of work, shortly before midnight on Wednesday, she published a report on the human rights situation in Xinjiang as the first High Commissioner for Human Rights in the history of the United Nations. Bachelet had not indicated whether the […]
It is always astounding how consistently the Chinese justice system works when public outrage over a crime is high enough. The brutal assault on four women in a restaurant in Tangshan two months ago was such a crime. Many people across the People’s Republic were left shocked and disgusted by these images. Their natural reflex […]
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple – the major US tech companies have collected a gigantic treasure trove of user data over the past decades. Every Google search, every conversation with Siri, every Amazon order and every post on Facebook is stored and can potentially be accessed forever. In everyday life, we have almost come to terms […]
Hourly location tracking, unrestricted access to personal calendars, and persistent requests to view a user’s contact list: The video app TikTok digs so deeply into users’ privacy that not even Facebook & Co dare to do. This is why TikTok has set a clear priority in its public relations work: To create distance from its […]
In today’s Profile, Merics researcher Nis Gruenberg talks about a vision from 2004 of what the future might look like if China was an economic power – an abstract idea at the time. 18 years later, that vision is now taking shape. Politically, however, increasingly sharp lines of conflict are emerging in the wake of […]
