The coronavirus pandemic has turned a conscious uncoupling into a messy breakup.

Will the Wuhan virus hurt party rule in China?

The July 12 ruling clarified the law of the sea, but may further alienate China.

Is China really heading for a hard landing? Experts say it's quite likely, as long as the ruling party thirsts for control.

Will the Chinese president's friendly address to business leaders translate to real progress during the upcoming state visit? Experts discuss.

When Deng Xiaoping arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in January 1979, his country was just emerging from a long revolutionary deep freeze. No one knew much about this five-foot-tall Chinese leader. He had suddenly reappeared on the…

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For anyone who observed the student-led mass protests that gripped Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for seven weeks in 1989, watching students fill the streets of Hong Kong in 2014 is a bittersweet experience. There is a natural instinct for Western observers—reared on Enlightenment values and the notion that history, even in China, moves inevitably toward ever-greater freedom and democracy—to be gratified by what we see happening there. We are uplifted by the spectacle of people struggling not only for liberty but to become “more like us.”

For anyone who observed the student-led mass protests that gripped Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for seven weeks in 1989, watching students fill the streets of Hong Kong in 2014 is a bittersweet experience. There is a natural instinct for Western observers—reared on Enlightenment values and the notion that history, even in China, moves inevitably toward ever-greater freedom and democracy—to be gratified by what we see happening there. We are uplifted by the spectacle of people struggling not only for liberty but to become “more like us.”

For historians, there is no more powerful aphrodisiac than an exciting topic buoyed by a raft of unexploited sources, raising the prospect of a revisionist look at an important figure or even an entire era. There are few leaders in modern Chinese history more layered with prejudice begging to be stripped away than Cixi, the dowager empress who ruled China for almost half a century until her death in 1908. For decades, she was condescendingly referred to in the West as “the Old Buddha,” the “She Dragon,” the usurper of a throne “over whose disintegration she presided.”

For those who look at China from afar, or see it on a visit through the lens of the towering new buildings, stunning airport terminals, state-of-the-art high-speed rail systems and dazzling architecture of monuments, museums, concert and municipal halls that dot cityscapes, it may seem counterintuitive that the leaders who guided this economic counter-revolution should be so sensitive on so many issues.

Every July, amid festivities and fireworks, the U.S. and France mark their birth as nations. Accustomed as we are in the West to histories that begin with triumph—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the storming of the Bastille—it may seem strange that China, the fast-rising dynamo of the East, marks the beginning of its journey to modern nationhood in a very different way: with the shock of unexpected defeat and the loss of national greatness. Many Chinese date the start of their modern history to Aug. 11, 1842, when the Qing Dynasty, by signing the Treaty of Nanjing, capitulated to Great Britain in order to end the disastrous First Opium War (1839-42). It was from this and many other subsequent defeats that China’s political elites—including the most progressive 20th-century reformers and revolutionaries—wove an entire national narrative of foreign exploitation and victimization. Even today, this fabric of ideas continues to hold powerful sway over China’s relations with the rest of the world.

For anyone who observed the student-led mass protests that gripped Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for seven weeks in 1989, watching students fill the streets of Hong Kong in 2014 is a bittersweet experience. There is a natural instinct for Western observers—reared on Enlightenment values and the notion that history, even in China, moves inevitably toward ever-greater freedom and democracy—to be gratified by what we see happening there. We are uplifted by the spectacle of people struggling not only for liberty but to become “more like us.”

For anyone who observed the student-led mass protests that gripped Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for seven weeks in 1989, watching students fill the streets of Hong Kong in 2014 is a bittersweet experience. There is a natural instinct for Western observers—reared on Enlightenment values and the notion that history, even in China, moves inevitably toward ever-greater freedom and democracy—to be gratified by what we see happening there. We are uplifted by the spectacle of people struggling not only for liberty but to become “more like us.”

The reason why both Americans and Chinese have become so nostalgic for the great Nixon/Kissinger-Mao Zedong/Zhou Enlai breakthrough in 1972 is because that was the last time that Sino-U.S. relations experienced a dramatic breakthrough. Now, most policy wonks on both sides sense we need another jolt to kick the way we interact into a higher gear, but nobody quite knows how to accomplish that. When he met Obama recently at Sunnylands, Chinese President Xi Jinping lofted the idea of a “new great power relationship.” But then, the cyber security issue that the Obama administration had already put on the front burner—especially the cyber theft of private corporate intellectual property—got written even larger by l’affaire Snowden. This gave Chinese nationalists a nice opportunity to mount a high horse and even the score up a bit, as Ministry of Defense spokesman, Yang Yujun, did when he defiantly proclaimed, “The Prism-gate affair is itself like a prism that reveals the true face and hypocritical conduct regarding Internet security of the country concerned” which by “making baseless accusations against other countries shows double standards and will be no help for peace and security in cyberspace.” To many, the incident came as a real setback to any hopes for a major new diplomatic breakthrough.

Many of those who watch U.S.-China relations have long hoped the two countries could have “a breakthrough”—or some kind of dramatic new agreement that signaled a recognition that our bilateral relations require bold action to make the ways we have been interacting comport with the reality of our radically changed relative power and influence balance.

In two of the world’s most opaque states, new leaders have just taken office: Pope Francis in the Vatican and President Xi Jinping in China. While the Pope was a surprise choice, Xi’s ascension was expected: he had already been named last November to the powerful positions of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the country’s Central Military Commission. Both men face mounting calls to govern more transparently and justly. The Pope has generated more news coverage, but it is Xi, as head of the planet’s biggest nation, who has far greater potential to influence…

There is hardly any American who knows China as well as Orville Schell. He has been studying the country, visiting it, writing about it, and been fascinated by it, for more than fifty years. He first arrived in Hong Kong, then a British crown colony, in 1961, when China was still an impenetrable, revolutionary nation ruled by Mao Zedong. Even by 1975, when he took his maiden flight into Beijing, China remained, as he would put it, a country lacking advertisements, private cars, fashion magazines, or private property. “There was not a single other aircraft moving on its runways,” he recalled. “It was as silent and dark as a tomb.” The young scholar was able to get a rare glimpse of the isolated country by working for a month at the Communist Party’s model village, Da Zhai.

This essay, written in memory of the Chinese astrophysicist and dissident Fang Lizhi, reexamines the period in Fang’s life when he was vice president of the University of Science and Technology of China and, because of his activities as an educational and political reformer, came to be dubbed “China’s Andrei Sakharov.” It also retells, from the perspective of an insider, the dramatic narrative of Fang’s year with his wife, Li Shuxian, living in the US embassy in Beijing following the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and subsequent massacre. But the special focus of this overview of Fang’s career is on his development as a thinker on questions of politics and human rights. Though Fang never returned to China and, while living in the United States, kept his distance from dissident movements, he continued to develop intellectually in ways that made him, in later life, China’s Václav Havel.

When, after two days of flying, one reaches the island of Bali only to realize that more days of travel lie ahead — from Denpasar to Makassar, then to Sorong in West Papua on one dodgy Indonesian airline after another, and finally a five-hour boat trip — a traveler begins to wonder whether a stay at an eco-resort on a remote Pacific Island will make all the jet lag, chaotic airports and carbon dioxide emissions seem worth it.

WHEN I returned to Beijing in the fall of 1986, after an absence of six months, it was hard not to feel disoriented by the sudden change in political climate. During the previous spring and summer, political and intellectual life had begun to thaw to an extent unprecedented since the Chinese Communist Party had come to power, in 1949. Following on the heels of a bold program of economic reform and of opening up to the outside world, which China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, had launched in 1978, this relaxation of Party control over economic, intellectual, and political life had filled the Chinese with a heady new sense of possibility.

The image of actress Meryl “The Iron Lady” Streep prostrating herself upon the stage of Beijing’s National Performance Hall before cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as if she were a legate from some minor-tribute-bearing principality performing thesanbai jiukou (three bows and nine prostrations) before the emperor, was one to put any historical aficionado of things Chinese in high reflection mode.

The world’s biggest corporation and the world’s most populous nation have launched a bold experiment in consumer behavior and environmental stewardship: to set green standards for 20,000 suppliers making several hundred thousand items sold to billions of shoppers worldwide. Will that effort take hold, or will it unravel in a recriminatory tangle of misguided expectations and broken promises?

Among the many difficult issues Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao will confront when they meet this week stands one possible bright spot: collaboration on clean energy technology. It represents a critical, urgent need, an enormous market opportunity for both nations and an area of potential common interest – if we can just avoid being our own worst enemies.

While sitting in Istanbul‘s Attaturk International Airport waiting for a flight, I was stunned to hear a BBC announcer report that my colleague and friend U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had just died. I knew that he had been rushed to George Washington University Hospital with a torn aorta. But, despite the seriousness of his condition, it was still unimaginable that he would not recover. After all, had “Holbrooke,” as his friends and colleagues always referred to him, not always prevailed? Had there ever been a challenge too daunting for him?

It was not so long ago that the parts of the globe covered permanently with ice and snow, the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greater Himalayas (“the abode of the snows” in Sanskrit), were viewed as distant, frigid climes of little consequence. Only the most intrepid adventurers were drawn to such desolate regions as the Tibetan Plateau, which, when finally surveyed, proved to have the planet’s fourteen highest peaks. Because these mountains encompass the largest nonpolar ice mass in the world—embracing some 46,298 glaciers covering 17 percent of the area’s land and since time immemorial have held water in frozen reserve for the people of Asia—they have come to be known as “The Third Pole.”

BEIJING: After speculation to the contrary, President Hu Jintao confirmed that he’s coming to Washington for upcoming nuclear proliferation talks. Not long after, Washington announced a delay in announcing any decision on whether China has been judged a “currency manipulator,” a dictum Congress requires that the US make on each country by April 15th.

All that is visible across the succession of deep, folding valleys hidden in darkness before me is the faintest outline of a sawtooth silhouette lancing up into a dazzling array of stars. I am standing alone on the rooftop of the dingy Pearl Hotel in Feilai Si, a small town that clings to a mountainside in southwestern China. Around me is a ghostly shroud of hotel linens that luff gently in the night breeze, seeming to mimic the Tibetan prayer flags fluttering on the hill behind. Otherwise, there is silence.

Lately, I’ve been studying the climate-change-induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the 2 billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems–the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim–that arise in these mountains isn’t much of an antidote to malaise either.

I have seen some woeful scenes of industrial apocalypse and pollution in my travels throughout China, but there are very few images that remain vividly in my mind. This is why the photographs of Lu Guang are so important. A fearless documentary photographer who lives in China’s southern province of Zhejiang and runs a photo studio and lab that funds his myriad trips around China, Lu photographs the dark consequences of China’s booming but environmentally destructive economic development in ways that stay with you. Evidently Chinese officials seem to agree, because they often try to censor his photography, forcing him to use an alias. On October 14, he was in New York to receive the W. Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography, which recognizes photographers “who have demonstrated a deep commitment to documenting the human condition in the formidable tradition of compassionate dedication that W. Eugene Smith exhibited.”

NEW YORK: On her recent whirlwind trip to Asia, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed not only set on bringing the US out of the global leadership wilderness in which it had fallen, but on bringing China into a whole new relationship with America. By inviting China to form a new partnership, the US has in effect challenged China to emerge from its cautious cocoon of self-reliance and embrace a leadership role befitting its wealth and power and new global reach. How China responds to this invitation in the months to come will have impact not only on its bilateral relations with the US, but on how the global challenges of economic crisis and climate change play out.

Secretary of state Hillary Clinton is headed to China. The inclusion of Beijing on her first trip overseas suggests that she and the new U.S. President intend to make the People’s Republic of China a keystone in the arch of America’s foreign relations. Paradoxically, Clinton will be aided by the fact that President Barack Obama has never been to Beijing, has previously said relatively little about China and is thus viewed there as something of a blank slate. Although that has caused anxiety among Chinese officials, it may also be a virtue.

The Beijing Summer Olympic Games are long since over, and the vortex of criticism, demonstrations, ceremonies, pollution concerns, acclaim and gold medals that swirled around China for months has subsided. In the process China’s world image was changed. By deftly using the games to draw a symbolic line between its past and what the world must hope will be a brighter future, China managed to project itself globally as a nation reborn from poverty, war, revolution and self-inflicted catastrophe and to rebrand itself as an emerging superpower approaching fuqiang (wealth and power).

The crackdown on dissent surrounding the Beijing Olympics has been a reminder of China’s lingering authoritarianism. Yet for all our differences, the U.S. and China — the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide — have no choice but to work together to tackle climate change.

On a snowy winter day in 1991, Lu Gang, a slightly built Chinese scholar who had recently received his Ph.D. in plasma physics, walked into a seminar room at the University of Iowa’s Van Allen Hall, raised a snub-nose .38-caliber Taurus pistol, and killed Professor Christoph Goertz, his thesis adviser; Robert A. Smith, a member of his dissertation committee; and Shan Linhua, a fellow Chinese graduate student and his rival.

The Olympics are an irresistible stage for athletes—but also for those who wish to act out their grievances before the world. The Beijing Games, which kick off on Aug. 8, are hardly an exception. While Chinese leaders furiously insist they’re not, and should not be, "political," these Olympics promise to become one of the most charged in history. Rarely has a more varied array of contentious issues crystallized around a single sporting event.

As bitterly cold air pours down from Siberia each winter, one of the charms of this ancient capital has been the sight of bundled-up people heading to Beijing’s picturesque frozen canals and lakes for ice skating.

What did President Richard M. Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger and Chinese leader Mao Zedong really discuss during their unprecedented February 1972 meeting in Beijing? With surprising frequency, Mao turned the conversation to the subject of women.