Word: communists
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...begin to understand the situation, the outside world should start by ignoring the standard cliché that the two communist governments are "as close as lips and teeth." Over the years, says Bruce Klingner, a senior analyst at Washington's Heritage Foundation and a former deputy chief for the Koreas in the CIA's analysis section, "the talk in both capitals about the other has often been pretty scathing." Even during the Cold War, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father, would routinely play the Soviet Union and China off each other. But while China and North Korea have...
...Hong Kong encourages an astute sense of politics among its residents, who are, by Chinese standards, well informed, not least because they enjoy unrestrained access to global news and political commentary. That Hong Kong was, in 1989, an undemocratic British colony with a seething communist giant as a neighbor merely taught people to pick their battles carefully - in itself a valuable political skill - and they saw Tiananmen as a cause worth the agitation. The principal of my primary school, who addressed us soon after the Tiananmen drama unfolded, warned us to ignore the protests and the marches, saying...
...flags. Office workers were given lists of random fax numbers in China and asked to transmit newspaper clippings of events, news of Tiananmen having been suppressed in China itself. Slow-driving protest convoys of motor vehicles took to the streets at night. Wild rumors flew around - one held that Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, a student sympathizer, had fled to Guangzhou and was preparing to mobilize southern divisions of the People's Liberation Army in an uprising against the north. At rallies, the song "We Love Freedom" gave way to the more sobering "Blood-Stained Aura." This had been...
...back to May 2005. Back then, CEOs loved China because it had become the world's low-cost, increasingly high-quality manufacturing hub. They loved its vast and growing ranks of middle-class consumers. Most of all, the capitalist bosses loved working with officials of the nominally communist Chinese government, who were far easier to deal with than the politicians back home. And why not? On one side, you had autocrats who feared losing their grip on power if the economy didn't keep growing; on the other were autocrats who feared losing their grip on power if profits didn...
...Meanwhile, there was a strong showing from some of the country's smaller parties. The Green Party won 12% of the vote, and the Left Party, successor to East Germany's Communist Party, took 7.5% of the vote. But the real winner was the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), which won its best-ever result in a European election, with 11% of the vote. The FDP, under its outspoken leader Guido Westerwelle, is Merkel's preferred coalition partner. Their combined results leave Merkel's Conservatives and the FDP just short of the 50% they would need in September should...