Torbjørn Færøvik's Blog, page 180

Uyghur scholar’s prison guard gets 7 years for revealing ‘secrets’

A Uyghur prison guard has been sentenced to seven years in jail for divulging information about the condition of prominent Uyghur political prisoner Ilham Tohti, people with knowledge of the situation said.Gopur Abdurreshit, 51, was arrested on Feb. 1 for disclosing information about Tohti, an economist and professor who is serving a life sentence on separatism-related charges, said a person

China sanctions 9 US firms over military sales to Taiwan

China imposed sanctions on Wednesday on nine U.S.-military linked firms for their sale of equipment to Taiwan and it denounced what it called the “dangerous trend” of U.S. military support for the democratic island. On Monday, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced the sale of aircraft spare parts and related logistics and support worth about US$228 million to Taiwan, adding that

Factlab: Has China not launched a war since 1949?

A claim emerged in Chinese-language social posts that China has not launched a war since 1949.  But the claim is misleading as it is a one-sided historical interpretation. A review of events shows that China has been involved in several major conflicts since 1949, and there are different views about how much of a role it played in starting them. The claim was shared on X, formerly known as

Torbjørn Færøvik: Kinas nasjonalforsamling har de siste dagene vært gjenstand for panegyrisk hyllest. Hvorfor?

Kinas såkalte nasjonalforsamling har de siste dagene vært gjenstand for panegyrisk hyllest. Ikke bare i Kina, men også i Nord-Korea, Laos, Nepal, Mali, Niger, Venezuela og flere andre land. Hvorfor dette oppstyret? Fordi forsamlingen, kjent som Den nasjonale folkekongressen, fyller 70 år. Hvilket betyr at den ble etablert i 1954. Men stopp nå litt: Ble ikke Folkerepublikken Kina opprettet fem år

The US led on nuclear fusion for decades. Now China is in position to win the race

The bustling city of Shanghai marks national celebrations with world-famous light shows, illuminating its skyscrapers with dazzling colors, like beacons of Chinese innovation. It is here that scientists and engineers work around the clock to pursue the next big thing in global tech, from 6G internet and advanced AI to next-generation robotics. It’s also here, on an unassuming downtown street, a

Ten-year-old Japanese boy dies after stabbing in China

A 10-year-old Japanese student has died one day after he was stabbed near his school in southern China. The boy, who was enrolled at the Shenzhen Japanese School, succumbed to his injuries early on Thursday, Japanese officials said. His assailant, a 44-year-old man surnamed Zhong, was arrested on the spot, local police said.Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called the attack "extremely

How China’s underground historians have fought the politics of amnesia

Spark was not much of a magazine. Handwritten and mimeographed secretly with a primitive machine at a sulfuric-acid plant in a remote region of central China, the publication began in 1960 and never went beyond two issues. The first was hardly more than a poem and a few articles, critical of Mao Zedong’s ongoing Great Leap Forward campaign. The young men and women involved in the venture were

In Retrospect: Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China (1981)

"The Communist Party of China has traversed sixty years of glorious struggle since its founding in 1921. In order to sum up its experience in the thirty-two years since the founding of the People’s Republic, we must briefly review the previous twenty-eight years in which the Party led the people in waging the revolutionary struggle for New Democracy."Read more

In Retrospect: When Gorbachev Came to Beijing (1989)

The talks went well, if not spectacularly. For Gorbachev, the crucial tete- a-tete was with Deng, who had forced him to wait three years for the meeting, a ploy in a cunning strategy to further Chinese aims such as a reduction in Soviet armaments and a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Their lunch Tuesday was cordial and uneventful. The high point came when Deng upstaged his visitor, the great

Southeast Asia Doesn’t Want to Choose between China and the U.S.

“One lesson that I’ve learned after studying geopolitics for fifty years is that a benevolent great power is an oxymoron,” former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani said at Asia Society, New York in March. “There is no such thing as a benevolent great power: All great powers, without exception, will pursue their own interests.”Mahbubani, who served two terms as Singapore’s representative to