Christina Larson: All Related Content

In a recently published piece, Foreign Policy's Christina Larson reports on how the company has taken China by storm, despite questionable procurement practices and pushback from Chinese civil society. Apple currently has hundreds of licensed resellers ...

Last Friday, July 1, one familiar face was missing from the usual lineup of past and present Chinese Communist Party leaders at the CCP's 90th-anniversary parade: Where was former President Jiang Zemin? Was he very ill, recently deceased, or for some reason not wanted there? No explanation was given for his absence -- not even an official acknowledgment of his nonattendance.

Seven years ago, China’s grassroots environmental activists won arguably their most remarkable victory. After a nationally coordinated, media-savvy anti-dam campaign, Premier Wen Jiabao responded in April 2004 by personally stepping in to suspend plans to dam China’s last free-flowing river, the Nujiang. With a nod to concerns that Chinese environmentalists had raised about the dam’s impact on local ecosystems, Wen asked that the plans be “seriously reviewed and decided scientifically.”

Massive development and urbanization are jeopardizing China's water supply. Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center and professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, and Christina Larson, contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and fellow at the New America Foundation, discuss China's efforts to deal with this challenge, and urbanization and water issues worldwide.

Original article

In glittering Shanghai, known for its hopping night life and influx of Western luxury stores, a VIP cocktail reception last Thursday night, May 26,marked the opening of a new H&M clothing store on upscale Nanjing Road. As a parade of BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes pulled up to valet parking alongside a red carpet unfurled on the sidewalk, an observer might never have suspected that the local government here in China's richest and most urbane city has been struggling with two very basic problems: keeping the water running and the power on.

To discuss the life and work of Hondros, we speak with Christina Larson, a contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine. We are also joined by Mohamed Dayem of the Committee to Protect Journalists about the increasing dangers faced by reporters ...

Since Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's Green Book was published in three installments -- in 1975, 1976, and 1978 -- every Libyan child has had to study it in school; but many, perhaps most, Libyans make fun of it in secret. Western analysts have tried to tease out the book's logic on governance, searching for clues to the intellectual influences on Libya's eccentric strongman, but this is perhaps an overly optimistic endeavor.

"There is a saying that Chinese people are afraid of officials, and officials are afraid of foreign reporters," my friend Yang, a wily reporter for one of Beijing's city newspapers, told me as we were driving to dinner one evening. That was last spring, well before the government's recent efforts to intimidate foreign reporters attempting to cover calls for a "jasmine revolution," but it has been true a long time.

Until recently, the Chinese paradox that most puzzled Western audiences was how to understand a country that is both communist and hyper-capitalist. But that is hardly the only, or even the most striking, paradox of the modern Middle Kingdom. China is fast on its way to becoming a global superpower, even as it grapples with such enormous domestic challenges as supplying enough energy to keep its cities lit, absorbing millions of rural migrants into cities each year, reining in choking pollution, creating a social safety net, and attempting to lift millions out of poverty.

One year ago, conservative and industry-backed opponents who shuddered at the prospect of a coordinated international effort to address the causes and impacts of climate change were busy conducting a witch hunt against climate scientists, looking for the bad practices of a few and trying to discredit the whole field.

Yang Xiao, a thirtysomething Chinese newspaper journalist, lives in one of the new high-rise developments on the outskirts of Beijing. Built six or seven years ago, the forty-story building complex is home to around 2,000 families—mostly young couples, some with children. A sign outside the front gate proclaims the name of the complex, “Rome,” which in China today connotes imperial grandeur. The exterior architectural details are a mix of Chinese megablock style and “Old European” flourishes.