In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss what Chinese President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power could mean for U.S.-China ties. For the Report, Tim Ferry talks with Peter Dörrie about a little-covered angle of the increasingly bitter diplomatic sparring between Taiwan and China: Taiwanese telecom scammers who have fanned out across the world to avoid detection, but often find themselves extradited back to mainland China, and more severe punishment, when they are arrested. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read [...]
Ever since Chinese President Xi Jinping failed to name an obvious successor to the Communist Party of China’s Politburo Standing Committee at its five-yearly congress last year, observers have suspected he might harbor ambitions for extending his grip on power beyond the two five-year terms allowed by the constitution. Yesterday, the party announced it would abolish those presidential term limits, clearing the way for Xi to continue in office indefinitely and suggesting that the era of collective leadership ushered in by Deng Xiaopeng is drawing to a close. The move comes at a moment of significant soul-searching among China-watchers in [...]
TAIPEI, Taiwan—In early May 2016, a police raid on a suspected money-laundering operation in the Taiwanese city of Taichung instead uncovered a large and wide-ranging telecommunications scam. Based in the Dominican Republic, the operation spanned the world, stretching from Taiwan to China and the United States. According to Capt. Lee Chi-shun, an investigator with the Criminal Investigation Bureau of Taiwan’s National Police Administration who was heavily involved in the case, the small shop raided by local police turned out to be a data center where money that had been fleeced from victims of telecom fraud was transferred onward to bank [...]
