Richard Bernstein

Cambodia: A Country for Rent

The Brands That Kowtow to China

China’s increased prickliness is not an isolated phenomenon. It seems part and parcel of a broader, more aggressive, and self-confident stance that includes an effort to shape and even censor the discourse on China in other countries.

Thailand: The Permanent Coup

Lee Ching-yu's Struggle

On March 19, a human rights activist from Taiwan named Lee Ming-che disappeared in mainland China.

US Education, Chinese Rules

Should Confucius Institutes—housed in US institutions, their curriculum largely shaped by Chinese guidelines—be closed or reformed?

Nail Salons: A Reply

Richard Bernstein replies to the New York Times editors’ letter on the subject of New York City nail salons.

The 'Times' vs. Nail Salons

Rarely does a newspaper story get the kind of response that *The New York Times* front-page exposé of wage-theft at nail salons prompted this spring. But was it true?

Thailand: Beautiful and Bitterly Divided

A fierce and intractable struggle for power

From China to Jihad?

Among the many stories concerning foreigners setting out to fight in Syria, the allegations about a group of Chinese Uighurs arrested in Thailand—many of them women and children—stand out.

Thailand's Rebel Taxis

When as many as 300,000 political protesters occupied Bangkok’s main commercial district, they were helped by an unusual ally: tens of thousands of motorcycle taxi drivers.

The Insoluble Question

The Hidden Khmer Rouge

In his documentary The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh uses small clay figurines to reconstruct the grisly reality of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime.

People's Republic of Rumor

The official Chinese media have reported that seventy-seven people died as a result of torrential rains last week, but the Chinese blogosphere tells a different story: of hundreds and possibly thousands of deaths, and widespread damage and chaos. Apart from describing the flood itself, these reports suggest that, once again, Chinese officials were striving to downplay the scope of a disaster to avoid public dissatisfaction. China is a country where there is no truth, though there is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence that if there is a truth on a subject deemed sensitive, whether about the feelings of Tibetans or the number of dead in a storm, it is to be found online, not in official accounts.

The Chinese Are Coming!

China's Tibetan Theme Park

In the international press, China’s tensions with Tibet are often traced to the Chinese invasion of 1950 and Tibet’s failed uprising of 1959. But for the Chinese themselves, the story goes back much further—at least to the reign of Kangxi, the Qing Dynasty emperor, who ruled for sixty-one years (1661-1722) and, in the official Chinese view, incorporated many lands, including Tibet, into a glorious Chinese empire. One of the most important symbols of those events, moreover, lies not in Tibet but thousands of miles east in the city of Chengde, near Beijing. There, Kangxi’s grandson, the emperor Qianlong, built one of the more astonishing architectural monuments in China: a Tibetan Buddhist temple housed in a scrupulously detailed scale model of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the seat of Tibetan cultural and spiritual power. This Little Potala, as it’s called, was intended as an architectural expression of the great unity of China under his rule. In recent years, the tourist authorities have used Chengde to create a sort of national monument to Kangxi, and, through him, to advance China’s contemporary position on Tibet.

A Very Superior ‘Chinaman’

The Disturbing Case of Xue Feng

Quiet diplomacy, as it’s called, has served for years as the principle guiding US relations with China: the theory is that it is far better to engage the Chinese government quietly, behind the scenes, rather than through more robust public confrontation. But how effective is quiet diplomacy in practice? Two cases have made this question urgent.

Booming China, Migrant Misery

There are an estimated 130 million *nung-gong*, or peasant workers, in China, making up what Lixin Fan, in his powerful documentary *Last Train Home* calls “the world’s largest human migration.”

The Empire of Sister Ping

At Last, Justice for Monsters