Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Authorities have detained at least 23 people in China’s Inner Mongolia region following protests last week against new rules requiring classes in primary and secondary schools to be taught in Mandarin, rather than Mongolian. Activists are warning of a broader campaign to chip away at Mongolian cultural identity, and based on recent reports from the region, a strict crackdown on ethnic Mongol communities is already underway. The “bilingual education” program in Inner Mongolia, announced just days before it was [...]
Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Guest contributor Thomas Lee wrote the lead story in China Note this week. Amid a global pandemic and a summer of natural disasters and social unrest in the United States, it might be easy to forget that the country is still locked in a destructive trade war with China. Not that China itself is far from the minds of the two major U.S. presidential candidates, especially President Donald Trump. During last week’s Republican National Convention, Trump not surprisingly went [...]
Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Guest contributor Yuan Ren wrote the lead story in China Note this week. President Donald Trump’s increasingly hawkish attempts to limit China’s influence in the United States broadened into cultural territory last week, when the State Department ordered the Washington headquarters of China’s state-funded Confucius Institutes to re-classify as a foreign mission in the U.S., much like its consulates and embassies. The Trump administration claimed that the government educational organization was under significant control of the Chinese Communist Party [...]
