China Featured Stories

Xi Jinping: a reign of failure

As Russia flirts with recession, its international standing permanently marred by images of the Bucha butchery, there will be no shortage of embarrassment in Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping miscalculated drastically by declaring a “no limits” partnership with Moscow in February, only three weeks before the invasion of Ukraine. China’s international reputation has been worsening […]

China

Secrets and lies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

Nine miles from the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, a cluster of nondescript buildings sits at the forested edge of the city. This is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it houses China’s only biosafety level 4 lab studying human infectious diseases. Since the beginning of the year a conspiracy theory has been quietly simmering […]

China Featured Stories

Dealing with the Devil: debt traps on the Belt and Road

The coronavirus crisis has frozen construction projects all along the Belt and Road, the century’s most ambitious geopolitical venture. Researcher Wade Shepard reports that “work has stopped along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Cambodia’s Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone has come to a standstill, the Payra coal power plant in Bangladesh has been delayed, and projects across Indonesia, Malaysia, […]

Culture War Featured Stories Philosophy & Psychology

The judicious rulebreaker: misunderstanding Jordan Peterson

11-minute read No one attracts criticism like Jordan Peterson. Since his emergence as a public intellectual in 2016, Peterson has been accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theorising. He stands apart from the other members of the so-called ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, his name a by-word for everything that is supposedly […]

Culture War

Fake News and Low-Resolution Narratives

10-minute read   A pleasing thing about growing older is that one’s experience and hopefully wisdom gently increase, not unlike a middle-aged waistline. It can be hard to know whether you’re becoming better and quicker at spotting patterns, discrepancies, and contradictions in the media, or maybe it’s just cynicism with a little confirmation bias sprinkled […]

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