At the entrance to Xingfuli, a residential compound in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, a bulletin board displays the names, photographs, and phone numbers of the people responsible for managing the neighbourhood. Though an ordinary bulletin board at first appearance, among the building representatives and Communist Party...

On 25 October, Brazilians will return to the polls to choose between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in an attempted coup. The...

The 18thBRICS Summit, held in New Delhi on September 12–13, occurred amid an exceptional intensification of international contradictions. Wars in West Asia, unilateral sanctions, tariff barriers, and the weaponisation of finance and technology have exposed the fundamentally unequal character of the...

President Xi Jinping’s forthcoming visit to the United States must be understood as more than an encounter between two heads of state, but it must be seen as an encounter between two possible futures. ...

The television series Asking the Vast Earth (问苍茫, 2023) opens with a scene of a young Mao Zedong swimming in the Xiang River, swollen from the heavy rains. A fisherman calls from the bank to the lone swimmer: ‘You fool, you’re asking to die! The...

In Minaçu, in the northern part of the Brazilian state of Goiás, the landscape bears the scars of an earlier mineral rush. For decades, the town depended on the Cana Brava asbestos mine, whose prosperity was inseparable from lethal illnesses and a long history of...

As one becomes more familiar with the complexities and civilizational depth of China, curiosity naturally extends beyond its major cities toward regions often obscured by mythology, ideological distortion, and geopolitical propaganda. This has certainly been my own experience. The more I learn about China, the...

The scenes unfolding in Beijing were carefully choreographed, yet politics can never be reduced to mere spectacle. When US President Donald Trump traveled to China for his summit meeting with Xi Jinping, Western media, as it often does, fixated on spectacle: lavish banquets, honor guards,...

From Beijing this week, the first US state visit to China in nine years is being staged for the world to see. The Great Hall of the People is open to Donald Trump, who has traveled with eighteen US executives—Apple, Tesla, BlackRock, Boeing, and...

China’s conduct in the UN Security Council often disappoints those who expect it to openly confront what they see as an unrestrained American imperial machine. This expectation was especially evident in China’s abstentions on two key recent occasions: UNSC Resolution 2803 on Gaza, which...