Laurence Westwood

In Xi Jinping’s China, the fight against corruption has become inseparable from the struggle for political control. Since the 1990s, there has been a popular saying in China: If the Communist Party doesn’t fight corruption, it will destroy China. But if it does fight corruption, it will be the end of the Communist Party. This then is the paradox that has faced the Communist Party of China since Deng Xiaoping instituted the Reform and Opening Up Era during the 1980s, where unprecedented...

From Mao’s informants to Xi Jinping’s digital panopticon, China’s Communist Party has transformed surveillance into its most potent instrument of political survival. “We know how much the internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Think how much it will change China. There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet. Well, good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” So spoke President Bill Clinton back in 2000, wrongly...

China’s environmental awakening has brought cleaner skies and greener industries, but the costs of decades of ecological devastation remain immense. Mao Zedong was not a farmer. Though born into a peasant family, he had little farming experience. It was political struggle that interested him. This struggle would come to define his whole life; struggle against everything he thought was holding China back from becoming the Marxist utopia it was destined to be. In 1917, as a youth, he famously...