Ten-minute read Conspiracy theory isn’t what it used to be. The term has taken on a pejorative quality of late, and those who subscribe are increasingly viewed as dangerous lunatics. It was once the case that a person who believed in shadowy government cover-ups was considered eccentric but harmless. Celebrity adherents were smilingly indulged. In […]
Secrets and lies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
10-minute read 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 […]
Dealing with the Devil: debt traps on the Belt and Road
8-minute read 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 […]
Is Hong Kong heading for civil war?
7-minute read When Chief Executive Carrie Lam addressed the Hong Kong press on August 13, she chose an alarming turn of phrase. “Look at our city and our home,” she said, apparently fighting back tears. “Could we bear to push it into an abyss where everything will perish?” As a puppet of the regime […]
Why Orwell was right
13-minute read 70 years have passed since George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four: the book that was to be his final work, his magnum opus, and perhaps the defining novel of the twentieth century. Orwell realised during the Second World War that the world was heading into “an age of totalitarian dictatorships – an age […]
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 […]
The long shadow of Tiananmen Square
14-minute read Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. On this day in 1989 martial law troops fired on student protesters and random bystanders outside the Square at the heart of Beijing, killing an as-yet-unconfirmed number – perhaps as high as ten thousand.i The number of the dead counts as one […]
The psychology of world citizenship
13-minute read In the early 1970s Henri Tajfel and his team of psychologists at Bristol University carried out a landmark study into social categorisation and its effects on intergroup behaviour. Tajfel had lost his entire family in the Nazi Holocaust, and so this was a subject that had always haunted him. In his most […]
Facing down the culture police
13-minute read Last week the pop singer Taylor Swift made headlines with an otherwise-unremarkable live performance. She was considered to have stolen some of her moves and production from the singer Beyoncé, and because Beyoncé is black, there were calls of ‘cultural appropriation’. Only a few short years ago this strange phrase would have […]
China’s ticking timebomb
11-minute read On 13 March 2015 Mihrigul Tursun arrived at an Egyptian airport with her eight-week-old triplets. She boarded a plane to China, hardly imagining that she was making the biggest mistake of her life. Mihrigul had planned to visit the children’s grandparents in the western province of Xinjiang, but when she arrived […]