China Archives - Page 42 of 94 - Foreign Policy In Focus

Approaching Tibet

by John Feffer, Ross Gearllach | Apr 9, 2008

In western China, the low-grade civil war that has brewed for decades in Tibet has recently expanded. The upcoming 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising of 1959, combined with China’s Olympic games this summer, have created an environment that Tibetan separatists believe to be especially conducive to achieving their goals. The emotional power of the date and the chance to act while China is incapable of closing itself off due to the presence of foreign journalists have emboldened activists both within and outside Tibet. As a result, the protests now threaten to erupt into a full-scale rebellion that could create widespread violence across the four provinces with large populations of ethnic Tibetans.

Tibet’s Dangerous Game

by John Feffer, Van Jackson | Apr 8, 2008

China take heed: a new generation of Tibetan youth is coming of age and these young people have little interest in playing by the rules of the game to which you are accustomed. As protests evolved into riots and riots turned into violence over the last several weeks in Tibet, it became increasingly clear that Tibetan youths do not plan on maintaining the status quo ante that has characterized Sino-Tibetan relations over the last generation. The recent escalation of violence between China and Tibet illustrates why China cannot continue to react to Tibetan discord in a typically authoritarian manner, particularly in light of the increasing role of exiled Tibetan youths in Tibet’s independence movement.

Arms Race in Space

by Marko Beljac, Emily Schwartz Greco | Mar 31, 2008

When the United States recently shot apart a crippled spy satellite over the Pacific Ocean, it also tested an offensive anti-satellite weapon and the potential for ballistic missile defense. “The shot,” as the Pentagon called the $100 million operation conducted on February 20, came immediately after Russia and China put forward a detailed, but flawed, proposal for a treaty to ban space weapons at the United Nations. In response, the United States immediately reaffirmed its unwillingness to participate in any arms control accord covering space.

The China Syndrome

by John Feffer, Michael Klare | Mar 5, 2008

On February 4, President Bush announced a baseline military budget of $515.4 billion for the next fiscal year, not including funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the largest one-year Pentagon request in real, uninflated dollars since World War II. This Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 figure represents a 7.5% increase over the 2008 appropriation of $479.5 billion and is expected to be the first of many rising requests supposedly needed to replace equipment lost and damaged in Iraq and to gear up for the security threats to come. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen explained last October, “we’re just going to have to devote more resources to national security in the world we’re living in right now.”

In the Dragons Lair

by Herbert Docena, John Feffer | Feb 20, 2008

Since the closure of its military bases in the country in 1991, the United States has incrementally regained, transformed, and deepened its military presence and intervention in the Philippines. The manner in which the United States has attempted to re-establish basing in the Philippines illustrates its attempts to radically overhaul its global offensive capabilities to become more agile and efficient while overcoming mounting domestic opposition to its presence around the world.

Capitalism in an Apocalyptic Mood

by Walden Bello, John Feffer | Feb 20, 2008

Skyrocketing oil prices, a falling dollar, and collapsing financial markets are the key ingredients in an economic brew that could end up in more than just an ordinary recession. The falling dollar and rising oil prices have been rattling the global economy for sometime. But it is the dramatic implosion of financial markets that is driving the financial elite to panic.

Asia’s Hidden Arms Race

by John Feffer | Feb 12, 2008

Often what is hidden in our world is so simply because no cares or thinks to look. Yes, a fair amount of attention has recently been given to the staggering new Pentagon budget request, the largest since World War II, that the Bush administration has just submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2009. It comes in at $515.4 billion – a 7.5% hike for an already bloated Pentagon — and that doesn’t include all sorts of Defense Department funds that will be stowed away elsewhere (even if in plain sight), nor does it include the couple of hundred billion dollars or more in funds to be appropriated largely via “supplemental” requests for the ongoing military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the official budget, however, includes staggering sums for procuring major new weapons systems and for R&D leading to ever more such big-ticket items in the future. According to Steve Kosiak, vice president of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “The fiscal year 2009 budget may be about as good as it gets for defense contractors.” When all is said and done, this will probably be a trillion dollar “defense” budget. As it happens, military budgets like this have a multiplier effect globally. After all, there’s no such thing as a one-nation arms race. It’s just that no one here thinking about what we’re about to feed the Pentagon pays much attention to such things. Fortunately, John Feffer, an expert on military policy and Asia, has been doing just that. He is the co-director of a particularly interesting website, Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington — with which Tomdispatch hopes to collaborate on projects in the future. (To subscribe to FPIF’s e-news service, click here.) In the following piece, he brings genuine arms-race news to all of us. Yes, Virginia, there is indeed an arms race underway; it’s taking off in Northeast Asia; and it’s dangerous. (Introduction by TomDispatch’s editor Tom Engelhardt.)

The Big Yam

by John Feffer | Feb 8, 2008

Headquarters was worried. Complaints were flooding in from the Chinese countryside about the quality of the new Haier washing machines. The water pipes were defective, the peasants told the Chinese manufacturer. But when the Haier team went to investigate, they were surprised to discover that the pipes were not broken or poorly fitted. Rather, they were clogged with yam skins. The peasants had been washing their dinner ingredients, not their clothes. An American manufacturer might have lectured the consumers about the proper uses of a washing machine. Haier’s CEO, Zhang Ruimin, decided instead to design a machine with wider pipes that could wash both clothes and large root vegetables. He called it the Big Yam, and the machine became a big seller in the Chinese countryside.

Is China a Threat?

by John Feffer, Henry Rosemont | Feb 6, 2008

China’s unprecedented industrial growth over the last two decades has raised the question of whether it now poses a threat to the security of the United States economically, militarily, or both. Economically, the extent to which China truly threatens the United States depends at least in part on the chauvinistic assumption that any potential challenge to absolute U.S. global economic dominance is threatening.

Challenging a Unipolar World

by John Feffer, Conn Hallinan | Jan 21, 2008

One of the more interesting phenomena to emerge from the U.S. debacle in Iraq is the demise of the unipolar world that rose from the ashes of the Cold War. A short decade ago the United States was the most powerful political, economic, and military force on the planet. Today its army is straining under the weight of an unpopular occupation, its economy is careening toward recession, and the only “allies” we can absolutely depend on in the United Nations are Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands.