Domestic Politics Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. In his first major policy speech on Taiwan since taking office in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Taipei on Wednesday that efforts to assert independence could be met with force and called unification between the “two sides of the strait” the “great trend of history.” Xi’s address at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, which largely reaffirmed China’s current policy toward Taiwan, came just over a month after the major opposition party, the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series on food security around the world. The impacts of a drastically warming climate are already being felt in Mongolia, where air temperatures have risen at three times the global rate since the 1940s. Average precipitation is declining and extreme weather disasters are more frequent, posing challenges for the country’s agriculture sector, which accounts for one-tenth of GDP and employs one-third of the labor force. In an interview with WPR, Tungalag Ulambayar, the research director of Saruul Khuduu Environmental Research & Consulting in Ulaanbaatar, discusses the threat that climate change poses […]

Editor’s note: Editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein’s column will be back next week. An estimated 4 million children have been born in Syria since 2011, according to UNICEF, which means that half of the children in Syria today have grown up only knowing war. “Every 8-year-old in Syria has been growing up amidst danger, destruction and death,” Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, said after a five-day visit to the country in mid-December. Since the government first crushed a popular uprising and precipitated the civil war that still shows little sign of ending, a third of the schools in Syria have […]