Monday marks five years since China imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong, criminalizing dissent and bringing the semi-autonomous city to heel after months of pro-democracy, anti-government demonstrations that drew as many as 2 million protesters into the streets. “The law itself was a weapon for Beijing to silence dissent in Hong Kong,…
In just the law few weeks, the Trump administration has attempted to deport student protestors on the basis of their pro-Palestine views; enlisted police to help execute what Democratic lawmakers described as a “hostile takeover” of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank; and claimed falsely that Kyiv, not Moscow, was responsible…
When Russian and Chinese élites talk about history, they often mean “History”—the grand Hegelian march toward progress. Since the end of the Cold War, the East has lived with the undignified thesis, popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” that democracy had defeated the authoritarian alternatives of the twentieth century. That idea…
On Dec. 10, longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow and abdicated his position as the country’s strongman after a whirlwind 12 days of regime collapse. He had inherited his autocracy, along with the banal instruments of repression and delusion used to control the country’s restive, multi-ethnic, multi-religious subjects, from his late father, Hafez…