The Economist, a leading British weekly, enjoys wide global readership. It recently covered the thoughts and written work of two scholars, both Chinese, one now government-based, in Beijing and the other based in an academic institution in the US. Only the former, was branded as an “ideologue” however. Paraphrasing Professor Julius Sumner Miller: Why is this so? (more…)
Richard Cullen
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Thinking intensely about the holocaust, Israel and Gaza
The vengeful, scheming, genocidal response unleashed since October last year in Gaza, by Israel, has prompted a profoundly intensified global review of the punishing history related to the establishment of the State of Israel and its colonial-settler expansion ever since 1948. (more…)
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Pearls and Irritations in the Pearl River Delta
Pearls and Irritations is widely read outside Australia. In particular, its content is now reviewed by certain media writing and presenting in Chinese in Hong Kong. (more…)
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Amidst rising American poverty, $6M per missile response in US war on Yemen
In October last year, Time Magazine reported a serious lift in poverty levels across America. You can read the full chilling report here. (more…)
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A remarkable Hong Kong media story
In Hong Kong, a vibrant Chinese media-oasis is forming within the vast territory long staked-out by the exceptionally dominant Mainstream Western Media. (more…)
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Does China want Trump to win in 2024?
Agathe Demarais is a senior policy fellow on geoeconomics at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a Foreign Policy columnist. She recently argued in that journal (with a clear anti-Trump tilt)-that “China is Rooting for Trump” (more…)
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What’s ruining America?
David Brooks describes himself as a moderate-conservative. Born in Canada but long resident in America, he is a respected, outspoken columnist for the New York Times and a range of other outlets. He has now explained what he believes is devastating America. (more…)
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The BRI gets it right
China’s Belt and Road initiative (BRI) operates on a huge scale and is the focus of rarely halted negative coverage across many prominent outlets in the Global West. A new extended article in the leading US journal, Foreign Policy, however, provides a measured, informed exception to this general rule.
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The state of Israel: A critical Swedish assessment
Around two decades ago, the Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, took an increasingly close interest in the wretched condition of Palestinians living under punishing Israeli domination. What he saw convinced him that Israel was maintaining an apartheid state very like those he had previously visited, at length, in Southern Africa. (more…)
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The remarkable global impact of the Chinese car industry: Trade beats war every time
Around 25 years ago, wise commentators said China may, in due course, be able to produce acceptable basic, manufactured white-goods but making motor cars that would sell globally was not conceivable. Far too many complex inputs went into making a modern family sedan compared to a refrigerator. As for landing a rover on the Moon and Mars – unimaginable. Those rovers successfully landed in 2013 and 2021 respectively. And now China has become the largest builder and exporter of motor cars on the planet. The Global West, especially, is widely surprised, indeed, startled. (more…)
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Henry George: more comebacks than Dame Nelly Melba
Henry George (1839 – 1897) was a remarkable, self-taught radical American political-economist who developed a theory of land taxation, which evolved to become, in essence, a programme for applying a single, substantial annual tax on all land – but not on improvements to the land such as buildings – while abolishing all other taxes. (more…)
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The American war on global capitalism
In January, 2023, Ezra Klein from the New York Times interviewed Yuen Yuen Ang. Professor Ang is a widely published, China scholar at Johns Hopkins University in the US. Towards the end of this long interview, Ang provided an acute summary of what US-China competition came down to. What matters most, she argued, is: Which of these two countries is going to make the best use of their political system to solve the problems of capitalism? Less than a year after Professor Ang laid out her concise test, America has verified that it is currently the one least able to measure up to this challenge. (more…)
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Living with the Sino nemesis
China’s economy today is around 50 times larger, in real terms, than it was 50 years ago. A World Bank report in 2022 confirmed that during this period, China lifted at least 800 million people out of extreme poverty, contributing close to 75% of the total reduction in extreme poverty, globally. (more…)
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China sees remarkable growth in global soft power
Almost all geopolitical “soft power” explanations draw on the seminal analysis by the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, who promoted the term in his 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. At that time, he wrote, “When one country gets other countries to want what it wants (this) might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” (more…)
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Return of the Wild West: America was built on genocide
Gravity-defying Western double-standards are now on worldwide display, as the US and its liegemen line-up to support a vengeful Israel to the hilt. Which prompts this question: what is the difference, today, between the universal human rights gospel of the Global West and a Potemkin Village? Answer: Increasingly little. (more…)
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Israel’s latest terrible war
Michael Hirsh has just published a withering review, in Foreign Policy, of the lead-up to horrific war now underway between Israel and Hamas entitled “Netanyahu’s Road to War”. (more…)
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American anxiety
Bad-tempered coverage of China continues to flourish across the entire US media. It ranges from fire-breathing to pearl-clutching. Most commentators look daggers at Beijing in a dozen different over-cooked ways – and especially at the Communist Party of China – while reminding readers and viewers of America’s continuing paramount superpower status. (more…)
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Fukushima’s nuclear waste: Stigmatising Russia, approving Japan
Twenty years ago, Japan demanded Russia halt disposal of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. What changed? Is it the case that there is felonious nuclear waste – and respectable nuclear waste? Japan seems to believe that this is so and the Mainstream Media understands why this narrative may deserve its support. (more…)
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Life on a geopolitical fault line
Hong Kong can do nothing right, it seems. But it’s not the community’s fault: it lives on a fault line, trying to balance between two much larger, more powerful entities. Richard Cullen recalls a different occasion when two big powers, the US and the UK, had a difference of opinion. Often, much smaller communities end up paying the price. (more…)
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How Pearls and Irritations rectifies distortion
Pearls and Irritations has played a fundamental role in providing an internationally recognised and widely read platform where serious arguments can now challenge the shallow, rancorous Hong Kong denigration agenda advanced by the MWM. (more…)
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$1 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban
The United States left Afghanistan in a state of dangerous and monumental disorder in 2021. Soon after, it made matters still worse by confiscating the meagre foreign exchange reserves of one of the world’s most deprived countries — shamelessly claiming that it was advancing certain human rights while doing so. (more…)
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Why Australia should never become involved in a Taiwan war
Australia should do all it can to foster a long-term, peaceful resolution of the acute, multi-decade dispute spanning the Taiwan Strait. But Chey and Keating are unmistakeably correct on this issue: Australia should never become involved in any war over Taiwan. (more…)
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Harvard China academic takes on the Economist
Even without Chat-bot assistance, it is fun to look up quotations and their origins online and then discover, for example, this quote reportedly from Winston Churchill: “The only statistics you can trust are the ones you have falsified yourself.” (more…)
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Intriguing tale of China’s speedy pandemic recovery
No jurisdiction has managed a flawless COVID response, says Richard Cullen. But China, despite its imperfect COVID management experience, did better than any other major jurisdiction and, in fact, displayed many examples of early-best-practice unseen elsewhere. Exasperatingly, the West found, yet again, that it there is much it can learn from China – and then, naturally, it got back to lecturing China on how to do things properly! (more…)
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The American version of “one country, two systems”
Over a period of decades, the US has refined and applied its own exceptional version of One Country, Two Systems. What is most curious is that this has materialised within plain sight yet it has largely remained undetected, as such. (more…)
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France bets on future by backing best global alternative
Recently, the former senior Singaporean diplomat and respected geopolitical consultant Kishore Mahbubani offered Australia some acute advice: Stop betting on the past. Mahbubani’s article was figuratively bookended with visits to Beijing by President Emmanuel Macron of France (shortly before publication) and President Lula da Silva of Brazil (soon after publication). (more…)
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Does the Vatican’s road to Beijing run through Hong Kong?
An invitation to visit Beijing was issued late last year to Stephen Chow, Sau-yan, the Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong. His recently completed visit is the first by a Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong to the Mainland since the recovery of Hong Kong by China in July, 1997. It may help provide a strengthened framework for the continuing dialogue between the Vatican and Beijing as they each proceed with their diplomatic long-game. (more…)
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The return of the paranoid American foreign policy
When a severe political cancer returns after a period of remission, we have a recurrence. In serious cases, cells from the original cancer regrow and spread virulently. One of America’s best-known commentators, Fareed Zakaria, recently compared the current grave dysfunctionality and panic-driven decision making in Washington to the worst of the McCarthy era in the 1950s. (more…)
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China formulates its own future
Despite countless Western bossy-boots beavering away in the media and beyond, generating worst-case projections as they strain to create a collective storyboard for “China: The Disaster Movie”, China, exasperatingly, keeps successfully pressing on towards its own clearly considered, affirmative future. (more…)
