A Chinese man living in Paris was recently shot dead by police in his home after allegedly attacking police with a sharp object, possibly a pair of scissors as claimed by police, after they entered his home.  This has caused the Chinese population of France, and specifically Paris, to become outraged and engage in protests and other demonstrations against law enforcement.  So why is this significant? The first part that is interesting is that the protests seem to have taken a similar form to the protests against the actions of police in the United States.  They are both based on similar sorts of events, and some have even turned violent, similar to American protests.  This is also significant because it has prompted the Chinese government to get involved.  The government of China has often criticized the treatment of the Chinese population in France, but this is the first time it has publicly criticized the actions of its law enforcement against Chinese citizens.  Through this it is reasonable to believe that the Chinese population of Paris has undergone hardship and injustice living in France for sometime, and this seems to be an ignited powder keg that has lead to protests.  It would also be reasonable to hypothesize that this sort of action by Chinese abroad could spark more protests back home in China, ones that are even more far-reaching than the ones now.

For this post I read an article from the Washington Post about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his recent meetings with the Chinese leadership in Beijing. Tillerson is attempting to build a constructive and mutually beneficial relationship with China.  He and president Xi Jinping both believe that the U.S. and China relationship needs to be defined by cooperation and friendship.  However, he has received some criticism for “handing China a victory.”  This is because there seems to be a disconnect between what the U.S. and China’s definitions are for “mutually beneficial.”  This Chinese believe this means that this means that each side will respect eachother’s core interests respectively.  In other words, this means the United States will not contest China on hot-button issues such as Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong.  China also seems to not understand what might entail the United States core interests.  At the same time, Donald Trump publicly criticized China and branded them a security threat.  In order to combat all of this, the United States and China need to come to some sort of mutual understanding on what their mutual interests are, in order to alleviate Trumps fears about China as a threat to our security.

In the journal article, “The Political Economy of Governing ISPs in China,” Henry Hu discusses the role that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) play in the CCP’s censorship and filtering capabilities.  These include not only making certain sites and content unavailable to Chinese citizens, but also making it impossible for foreigners to access domestic Chinese content by using the “Great Firewall.”  The government does this in an attempt to keep out content, media, and information that they deem “harmful” to the party.  They believe that they can censor the thoughts of their citizens by only exposing them to approved Chinese content and by keeping out foreign media.  This is similar to what has been done in other communist regimes, such as Russia and North Korea.  The leaders of these countries seem to be convinced that if their citizens get their hands on Western Media, that it will put dangerous ideas in their heads that are against the party, and will ultimately lead to their downfall.  This definitely seems to be what is happening in China, mainly due to the fact that the Great Firewall is run by the central government.  While the creation of censored content in mainly the domain of the local governments of individual cities, the central government is in charge of keeping foreign media out, and prevent foreigners from accessing their media.  This shows a great level of insecurity within the regime, that they seem to believe that just giving their citizens access to youtube will be dangerous to their party.  In some sense I can see where they are coming from.  Social media has become a powerful tool to be used against governments in the past decade. Like in Egypt, the protests and riots were organized using social media, so if this is truly of concern to the CCP then it could be a smart strategy to censor their internet.