Beginning by educating Africans on Chinese culture through Confucius Institutes on the continent, China now provides thousands of scholarships per year to African seeking to study at Chinese universities. But this arrangement is more than an educational exchange; it is Chinese soft power at work.

Several Chinese friends have sympathetically said that I am “too Americanized,” as if I have betrayed my own culture. But I am definitely not American, and I have no desire to become one. My mindset hasn’t shifted to a nationalist one, nor have I joined the “China-bashing club,” while I’m certainly critical about all its faults. Watching China from afar, I’ve gained a much clearer view of its problems than when I was on the ground covering and living through them.

In 2017, 10 million Chinese high school students compete fiercely for college entry. At the same time, as many as 7 million college graduates will enter the job market. Without appropriate measures to be taken, the employment of college graduates could become a problem causing big headache.

While China barrels ahead building a new Silk Road for the 21st century, abandoned zones in the West reach a dead end.

Between them, Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia have been subject to many of the tools that Chinese authorities use to suppress online speech. The breadth and intensity of these measures has placed China at the bottom of Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net rankings, which assess 65 countries, for the past two years.

The message congressional Republicans took from the 2016 elections was that Republican voters like Trump and hate virtually everyone else in the Republican Party. They fear that if they ever break rank with him they’ll be voted out in the next election. Few politicians got very far by blaming the electorate or scolding them for their bad choices.

As unusual as the recent detention of three labor activists in Jiangxi may seem, particularly given the case’s connection to the U.S. president’s daughter, it actually reflects broader trends related to labor rights in China. While new labor reform laws have yielded some positive results for Chinese workers, they’ve triggered new challenges. A strong response from the United States could not only help the men avoid prison, but also offer critical support to all Chinese workers.

Ivanka Trump’s brand was bruised when China detained several worker activists investigating her shoe brand. The specter of an independent labor movement both drives and constrains every facet of China's labor policy, both its reforms and its use of repression. Can China’s leaders get past the current period of rising – yet localized and non-political – labor unrest without going down the time-tested road of collective bargaining through independent trade unions?

On the first of July, Hong Kong will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its return to China. HKSAR's first chief executive reflects on how far the city has come, where it is today, and what the future may bring.

In the past, analysis of the evolution of humanity’s worldview has tended to focus on the West. Now, however, this narrative is being revised. The global economic crisis that originated in the United States in 2007 exposed the fragility of the advanced-country model, giving rise to a new, more multipolar worldview, in which the emerging economies, led by China, India, and Russia, have increasingly challenged the status quo.