John Wagner Givens

The Bo Xilai affair has all the makings of a truly great political scandal... or a mediocre thriller. But the real value of this sordid tale is the divide it demonstrates between the manner in which the Western public and the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) top leadership understand China's politics....

For Chinese democrats, it has been a rough couple of decades. Despite hopes of democratization or liberalization following the Tiananmen protests, there has been little progress and in some areas even a tightening since the relative liberalism of the late 1990s. Yet in the past couple of months, maybe, just...

As the Republican primary turns vicious, Mitt Romney is mobilizing his pro-business credentials by attacking his rival, Rick Santorum, for his "unapologetic defense of big labor'' and framing himself as the true fiscal conservative. At first, there might seem to be little ground for doubting Mr....

Too often, discourse about China takes the same unfortunate format. I have seen it from the media, think tank and NGO reports, "popular" books written by academics, politicians, and even from students. First, a partial list of China's problems is...

Those who follow events in China will have noted recent reports of the intimidation, detention, abduction and torture of well-known Chinese activists, especially lawyers. While I would like to add my voice to those condemning this string of incidents, I would also like to sound a note of...

Before the ink was dry on Hosni Mubarak's resignation and Cairo's streets began to clear, every news agency worth their Google ads began to report on the impact of Egypt's protests on China. Some pundits even suggested that China might be next. The problem with such...

In a single 24-hour period in September, Elizabeth Economy, the director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Chinese dissident writer, Liao Yiwu, each commented on the potential of Twitter to affect political change in China. Presumably both were referring to Twitter clones,...

When I started this blog, it was not my aim to use it as a forum to criticize Anglophone reporting on China. Yet I find myself becoming increasingly incensed by China coverage and rarely does a week go by that I do not see something worth taking to task. This...

On April 9th, the LA Times featured an article by Lily Kuo on the Beijing location of the US chain, Hooters, claiming that it offered "a snapshot of changing attitudes toward sex in China". The article, a concise example of much of what is wrong with journalism about...

On October 28, Ford announced that it had picked China's biggest carmaker, Geely, as the preferred bidder for its Volvo brand. In June, General Motors, the former car giant and current burden to the American taxpayer, announced that it would sell its Hummer brand to China's...

For China and the world, June 4th, the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, is a time for reflection. One important question emerges from the narrative of this reflection: after 20 years, how could a protest of such magnitude and repression of such brutality have resulted neither in significant...

In the world's biggest annual migration every Chinese New Year over one hundred million internal migrants take a break from their jobs and studies in China's swelling cities to return to their families in the countryside. In 2008, snowstorms disrupted travel across China, leaving tens of millions stranded at...

On November 10th, China's Ministry of Culture published for public comment a draft of its new Regulations for Commercial Public Performances. Normally such minutiae don't make headlines, but Article 29 of the regulations is notable for barring performers who pretend to sing or play an instrument to pre-recorded music....