Boycotting Cotton

As the mechanics of China’s genocidal repression of its Uighur minority has become more and more evident, the hunt has been on to find the link between the systematic suppression of a cultural minority and global commerce.

China’s Media Empire

It has become increasingly clear that communist China is a world-spanning empire-in-waiting. More than this, its leaders are increasingly unwilling to wait.

The Genocide Convention May Hinder Rather Than Help Victims

Each year we mark Holocaust Memorial Day, an anniversary that has increasingly become a rallying point against genocide in the abstract as well as in the specific. This year, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, and a number of other faith and interfaith organisations used the occasion to decry China’s ongoing genocide against the Uighur minority, who have been confined in their millions in re-education-cum-work camps, forcibly sterilised, and impressed into a system of slave labour for which we have increasingly incontrovertible evidence.

Recognising the Inevitable

Political activism in Hong Kong has hardly been a carefree pursuit since the handover. But things have become rather less calm in recent months. A few days ago, the Chinese-imposed executive mounted a mass arrest of the same democratic politicians whose successes in recent elections so embarrassed Beijing. They were detained under the national security law that was finally enacted in June, which attracted great protest and condemnation due in no small part to the capacity it contained for actions just like this.

Britain’s New Sanctions Regime

Minor excitement in the diplomatic world as the British government announced that it would, for the first time, issue direct sanctions against human rights-transgressing countries without doing so under the auspices of the European Union, NATO, or the United Nations.

China’s New Surveillance State

Authoritarian states do not respond well to crises. They deceive and conceal, and care little for human life when compared to the survival of the regime. But when a crisis settles in, and becomes routine, tyrannies can always be counted upon to capitalise somehow. They can turn the very worst that befalls a people to the state’s advantage.