China Archive

The most newsworthy thing about last weekend’s BRICS summit, judging from the dearth of media coverage of the gathering in Goa, India, was its lack of newsworthiness. As recently as last year, the BRICS summit was accompanied by headlines of the challenge the grouping of major emerging economies poses to America’s global position. As a coherent political bloc, the BRICS—made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—was always overblown. Now it seems it has already blown over. To be fair, Sputnik International, the Kremlin-financed Russian propaganda outfit, made a valiant effort this year to highlight the forum’s “expanding […]

Last month, China successfully launched the world’s first quantum satellite, which is designed to establish “hack-proof” communications between space and the ground. The launch puts China ahead of its rivals in the quest to develop quantum technology, which has major implications for security and defense policy. In an email interview, Taylor Owen, an assistant professor of digital media and global affairs at the University of British Columbia and the author of “Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age,” and Robert Gorwa, a graduate student at the Oxford Internet Institute and a researcher at the University of […]