There are a good number of cables about China in State Department documents just released by WikiLeaks.  China is the fifth most often mentioned country, with 8320 records, trailing Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Israel.  There are almost 4000 cables from the U.S Embasssy in Beijing, about the same from the American Institute in Taiwan, and slightly more from the U.S Embassy in Tokyo. Read more »

Photo courtesy of flickr/Chrystian Guy

While much of the sturm and drang of the “big” issues in U.S.-China relations–Tibet, North Korea, Iran, and RMB revaluation among others–seems to have dissipated in the intense summer heat wave we have been enjoying here on the East Coast, a number of conflicts over technology continue to bubble along.

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Just a few weeks after Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton contrasted two visions of the Internet, one free and open, the other splintered by “electronic barriers,” the contrast between the two is growing a little murkier. Read more »

With Rob Knake, I have a new piece up on Yale Global Online about the race between innovation and security.

We use the hacking of Google not to focus on human rights or cyberwar, but rather to show a growing tension between a globalized model of innovation, based on ever-quickening times to market and geographically disbursed R&D and manufacturing, and the need for greater reliability and security. In the end, we come to a slightly heretical conclusion: if we want greater security, we probably have to sacrifice the pace of innovation. Read more »

Everyone is in a tizzy over the supposed downturn in U.S.-China relations. (See here, here, and here.) The rhetoric is heating up on both sides, and new issues of contention appear to pop up daily. Our disputes over Copenhagen, Google, Taiwan arms sales, the Dalai Lama and Iran are all front page headlines. Are we indeed headed for an open rift in the relationship that could imperil future cooperation on a range of important, pressing global matters? Read more »

My reaction to Secretary of State Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom, “The Chinese Internet Century,” is now up.  While Clinton’s call for an open, global Internet was both stirring and the right thing to do, we have to start planning for a world where China and others shape their own cyberspaces to meet economic, political, and strategic interests. Go read the whole thing at foreignpolicy.com. Read more »

Although it was buried amidst the past month’s news of the global financial crisis and Barack Obama’s struggles to maintain any political momentum, the global monitoring group Freedom House released its annual Freedom in the World outlook, which assesses the state of political and civil liberties in each country. For the fourth year in a row, global freedom declined, which Freedom House said was the longest continuous decline in the nearly forty years it has been producing the report. (Disclosure: I participated in some of the Freedom House assessments of countries in Southeast Asia.) Indeed, 2009 was one of the worst years in recent memory for human rights activists, with crackdowns on prominent figures from Liu Xiaobo to Shirin Ebadi, whose Nobel Peace Prize was seized by the Iranian government. (Talk about spite!) Read more »

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Internet speech was noteworthy for a number of reasons—but what struck me most was her comment that principles like information freedom aren’t just good policy connected to American values; they are universal. I like the sound of that. Read more »