Torbjørn Færøvik's Blog, page 1312

Foreign Journalists in China Face Increasing Intimidation, Survey Says

Nearly three-quarters of foreign correspondents in China experienced intimidation or harassment while reporting in the past year, according to a survey of reporters in the country. Read more

Wealthy Chinese Heading Abroad to Buy Diamonds Without Scrutiny

Wealthy Chinese who made their country into the world’s second-biggest market for diamonds are now increasingly traveling abroad to buy the stones, at a time when ostentatious purchases are frowned upon at home. Read more

U.S. Schools Expelled 8,000 Chinese Students

As tens of thousands of Chinese students prepare to study in the U.S., they might reflect on the experience of some of those who went before them. According to an estimate by a U.S. education company, some 8,000 Chinese students were expelled from American universities last year alone – and the main reasons were poor grades and cheating. Read more

Kinesiske penger trekkes til Norge av lav oljepris og høy kunnskap

Det dårlige forholdet mellom Norge og Kina er knapt noen hindring når pengene rår. Lav oljepris og billig krone gjør mange norske selskaper ekstra attraktive, og nå meldes det om økt interesse fra kineserne. Read more

"New Silk Road" Part 2: Cold War Or Competition?

It is important to understand that the new “Road’ is not a formal plan in any sense but merely a broad outline of goals, a work in progress, being filled in, opportunistically, with projects as they are developed, and as negotiations with target countries allow. The Road is also not a 'start-up' from scratch, but builds upon and extends a number of projects that have been ongoing with China's

A Shanghai artist has been detained for comparing China’s president to Hitler

A Shanghai artist has been detained for comparing Chinese president Xi Jinping to Adolf Hitler as well as an anus. Dai Jianyong, a street photographer best known for making what he calls a “chrysanthemum face“—the flower is a slang term in Chinese for anus—was detained on criminal charges today, according to the advocacy group Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Read more

For American Students in China, Some Risks, No Regrets

For a growing number of global citizens, boarding a plane from New York bound for Beijing is only slightly more uncommon than flying to Houston or San Francisco. Among those who make the trans-Pacific journey, perhaps no group more deeply commands our attention than students in institutions of higher education. Read more

On the 26th Anniversary of Tian’anmen Massacre – an Open Letter to Fellow Students in Mainland China

We are a group of Chinese students born in the 1980s and 1990s and now studying abroad. Twenty-six years ago on June 4th, young students, in life’s prime with innocent love for their country just as we are today, died under the gun of the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing’s streets. This part of history has since been so carefully edited and shielded away that many of us today know very

Solving the Rohingya Crisis

The crisis highlights two points: First, ASEAN lacks both political agreement and a clear legal framework on how to respond to refugees. Second, unless Myanmar changes its policy of systematic discrimination and persecution of the Rohingya population in Rakhine state, the crisis will continue. Read more

China cybersecurity plan aims to protect state secrets: official paper

China will prepare a five-year cybersecurity plan to protect state secrets and data, the official China Daily said on Thursday, citing a senior official of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Read more