If you would like to receive Latin America Brief in your inbox every Friday, please sign up here . The highlights this week: We recap some of the year’s biggest stories , including how Gabriel Boric’s election victory in Chile is emblematic of a year where social inequality drove politics […]
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Chinese Officials Arrest Over 2,500 ‘fugitives’ Abroad During COVID Pandemic: Report
According to a new investigation, Chinese officials arrested around 2,500 “fugitives” from abroad and returned them to China during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Guardian report, the fugitives were apprehended as part of a programme that used tactics ranging from family intimidation to “state-sanctioned kidnapping.” In a report released […]
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The Omicron Variant Arrives in Beijing
If you would like to receive China Brief in your inbox every Wednesday, please sign up here . The highlights this week: Beijing detects its first case of the omicron variant two weeks ahead of the Winter Olympics, China’s birth rate plummeted again in 2021 despite changing policies, and two […]
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Biden’s First Year
Even though allies and partners are now the foreign-policy tool du jour, there’s an important area of continuity between Biden and the former commander in chief he once told to “shut up” on the debate stage. Biden has put together a retrenchment-minded foreign policy that has seen U.S. troops pull […]
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Our Favorite Profiles of the Year
Before she became British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s foreign secretary in October, Liz Truss was best known for the “cheese speech”—an address to a Conservative Party Conference that was so impassioned it became a meme. Seven years later, she is the face of “global Britain,” with crises rife at home […]
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Nathan Law’s Lesson for Democracies
Freedom: How We Lose It and How We Fight Back, published with co-author Evan Fowler, is not a memoir. Law has instead produced a treatise on democracy interspersed with his autobiography. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aggressively seeks to rewrite Hong Kong’s history, painting the 2019 and 2020 protests that […]
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Autocrats Are Exploiting COVID-19 to Weaken Central Bank Independence
Over the last several decades, central bank independence became the sacred cow of monetary policy. Dissenting murmurs emerged during the 2007 to 2009 recession, when some suggested the U.S. Federal Reserve should focus on jobs, not inflation. Since COVID-19, these murmurs have become prominent points of contention, permitting backtracking on […]
Read Time : 13 Minutes
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Biden’s First Year
Even though allies and partners are now the foreign-policy tool du jour, there’s an important area of continuity between Biden and the former commander in chief he once told to “shut up” on the debate stage. Biden has put together a retrenchment-minded foreign policy that has seen U.S. troops pull […]
Read Time : 9 Minutes
Biden’s Climate Diplomacy Is a Gift to China
In reality, Beijing sees climate diplomacy as just another venue to gain strategic advantages over the United States and its allies. It has learned the West is easily gamed: China can extract concessions and encumber rivals with costly emission restrictions that slow their growth while avoiding similar restrictions on its […]
Read Time : 45 Minutes
10 Conflicts to Watch in 2022
After all, by some measures, war is in retreat. The number of people killed in fighting worldwide has mostly declined since 2014—if you count only those dying directly in combat. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, figures through the end of 2020 show battle deaths are down from seven […]