“Nothing lasts forever – even the longest, most glittering reign must come to an end someday.” And so it was that Britain’s celebrated fictional Machiavellian mastermind Francis Urqhuart greeted viewers…
After days on the streets, thousands of Hong Kong residents are still occupying several major streets of their city. Already nicknamed as the “umbrella movement” because of protesters’ use of umbrellas…
From 1997, when Hong Kong was officially “returned” to China after Britain’s long lease, the tiny island was bound to remain something of an anomaly. The difference is palpable the moment you travel from…
Are political developments in Hong Kong heading for a second Tiananmen massacre? A fortnight ago, partly to provoke discussion, partly to sound an alarm, I suggested in a radio interview that unless the…
The pro-democracy protesters in the streets of Hong Kong, once again confront Beijing with the age-old conundrum of how to balance authoritarian control and the demands of a complex modern society. For…
There has been much publicity in recent years about China and its teachers. After the most recent results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) were published in 2013, considerable…
On September 19 the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, concluded a three-day trip to India. As he set off to meet Narendra Modi, Xi wrote in The Hindu that China and India “need to become co-operation partners…
Ashok Sharma, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Narendra Modi is making his first visit to the US as prime minister of India. He will give his maiden speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 27 and then proceed to Washington for a…
The referendum on Scottish independence was hailed in many parts of the world as a shining example of democracy in action. Not so in China. There, in a concerted campaign to shape public opinion, the state-controlled…
The 2014 UN Climate Summit has wrapped up in New York. What has progressed and what big challenges remain in the run up to and beyond the Paris negotiations in December 2015? Secretary General of the UN…
China’s recent move to limit imports of the dirtiest coal from 2015 onwards is a scary prospect for Australian miners. The proposed restrictions will ban the burning of coal with high levels of ash or…
There are a few notable absentees among the more than 120 world leaders gathered in New York for today’s United Nations Climate Summit. Perhaps most notable of all is the head of the world’s highest-emitting…
Greed is still good. Wall Street has just witnessed its largest ever stock market launch as Chinese internet giant Alibaba raised some $25 billion and watched its share price rise by 35% on its first day’s…
Qing Wang, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
Alibaba shares will start trading on the New York Stock Exchange in a record-breaking initial public offering(IPO) which could end up raising US$25 billion. Investors have bought into a new kind of internet…
In the lead-up to the UN leaders’ summit on climate change, China is shifting up a gear in its drive towards national emissions trading. Yet for carbon pricing to be effective, market reform in China’s…
With the failure of international agreements to fight climate change, the way is open to viewing the role of renewables as more than agents for reducing carbon emissions. Indeed is it possible for countries…
While Western nations beef up economic sanctions and Nato discusses what stance to take toward Russia, the BRICS are maintaining tacit support for Moscow despite the Ukraine crisis. This is not entirely…
Despite recent slumps in economic growth (now at just over 5.4% compared to 10.3% in 2010), former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this year handed the new Prime Minister Narendra Modi a much more…
The human sex ratio, which is usually defined in terms of the number of males per 100 females, varies greatly between countries and regions. The biological norm is for the sex ratio at birth to be about…
PUP leader Clive Palmer has made a grovelling apology to the Chinese for his extraordinary outburst on television, in which he referred to them as “bastards” and “mongrels”. In a letter to the Chinese…