分类： politics

BEIJING – Zhu Rongji, the fiercely determined, plain-spoken former Chinese Premier whose sweeping economic reforms laid the groundwork for China’s emergence as a global economic powerhouse, has passed away at the age of 97. According to China’s official Xinhua News Agency, Zhu died of illness in Beijing at approximately 11 a.m. on Wednesday.

Over his five-year tenure as premier from 1998 to 2003, China’s top economic policy post, Zhu pushed through a wave of transformative changes that built on the early market-oriented reforms launched by former leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979. A figure unafraid to push back against entrenched interests, Zhu clashed with Communist Party conservatives and state-owned industry leaders as he pushed unwieldy state enterprises to restructure for efficiency and profitability. The restructuring process resulted in millions of layoffs, but it cleared the way for decades of rapid expansion that ultimately saw China overtake Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, trailing only the United States, by 2010.

One of Zhu’s most historic legacies is steering China to membership in the World Trade Organization, a milestone that capped nearly 20 years of marathon negotiations. The effort nearly collapsed during a 1999 trip to Washington, where the Clinton administration rejected Zhu’s initial market-opening concessions as insufficient, while domestic political opponents attacked him for conceding too much. Zhu persevered, and China formally joined the WTO in December 2001, locking in national commitments to free trade that allowed him to pressure local officials to end protectionist policies for favored domestic companies. The entry into the global trading system ultimately helped transform China into the world’s largest exporter, and supported annual economic growth that averaged above 8% between 2000 and 2010, peaking at 14.2% in 2007.

Beyond trade and state industry reform, Zhu launched China’s modern homeownership boom in 1998 with an initiative to sell off state-owned enterprise housing to urban families. Within a decade, the majority of urban housing in China was privately owned, reshaping the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. He also famously tamed double-digit inflation in the early 1990s while serving as deputy premier, implementing strict price controls and cutting off lending to unprofitable state firms, pushing back against fierce resistance from local leaders. Another key policy achievement was restructuring China’s tax system to increase central government revenue from local authorities, a reform Zhu once joked made him worthy of a Nobel Prize in economics.

Unlike many authoritarian leaders, Zhu rejected the narrative of ruling party infallibility, openly admitting fault and taking responsibility when government policies failed. After devastating 1998 summer floods that killed more than 4,000 people, he condemned shoddily built flood dikes embezzled by corrupt officials as “no stronger than bean curd.” In 2001, he issued a public national television apology after a southern China schoolhouse explosion killed at least 42 people, most of them children, for his cabinet’s failure to prevent the tragedy. His blunt, demanding style and zero-tolerance approach to corruption earned him the nicknames “Boss” and “Zhu Fengzi” — or “Madman Zhu” — and he famously declared in 1998: “I have prepared 100 coffins here — 99 for corrupt officials and one for myself.”

Zhu’s path to power was marked by decades of hardship for his willingness to speak his mind. Born in October 1928 in Hunan Province, the home province of Mao Zedong, Zhu was labeled a “rightist” in 1957 just a few years into his career as an economic planner for praising reform efforts in Hungary and Yugoslavia. He spent 22 years on the political margins, and was exiled to the countryside to perform manual labor during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. He was formally rehabilitated in 1979 following Deng’s rise to power, and rose quickly through the ranks: he became deputy party secretary of Shanghai in 1987, and mayor a year later, where he earned a reputation for moderating tensions with pro-democracy protesters and avoided military intervention that could have escalated violence, according to contemporary diplomatic accounts.

After Jiang Zemin was elevated to top party leader in Beijing, Zhu was brought to the capital as deputy premier in 1991, and joined the party’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee in 1993. When he was appointed premier in 1998 at age 69, he ranked third in the country’s party hierarchy, behind President Jiang Zemin and ceremonial legislature chairman Li Peng. Though he lacked his own independent political power base — a limitation he once complained let lower officials ignore his orders — Zhu leveraged his position as top economic policymaker to advance his transformative agenda.

Not a radical advocate for full privatization, Zhu was a skilled pragmatic bureaucrat who carried out the party’s mandate to modernize China’s state-dominated economy. He oversaw the restructuring of major state-owned assets including banks, airlines, and oil companies into profit-focused corporations, while retaining majority government ownership of the firms.

Widely popular among the Chinese public for his crackdown on corruption and willingness to speak plainly, Zhu stepped down from the premiership in 2003 and rarely made public appearances in the years that followed. A correction to an earlier version of this report clarifies Zhu was 97 at the time of his death, not 98 as initially reported.

A coalition of four prominent U.S.-based human rights organizations filed a federal lawsuit against the second Trump administration on Tuesday, challenging the legality of sweeping sanctions imposed on the International Criminal Court (ICC) earlier this year. The plaintiffs — the American Friends Service Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute — argue the executive order sanctioning the court and anyone associated with its investigations is blatantly illegal, and violates core constitutional protections enshrined in U.S. law.

The legal challenge alleges that the sanctions regime forces the groups to restrict their human rights and legal advocacy work, directly violating their First and Fifth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Any individual or organization found to have collaborated with ICC investigations or court officials now faces severe legal and financial penalties under the order, creating a chilling effect that has halted critical work on behalf of war crime victims, the groups said.

The controversial sanctions were imposed just days after Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency in late January 2025, when he signed the executive order targeting the ICC over its active investigations into senior Israeli officials accused of war crimes in Gaza. The order specifically named then-ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan as a sanctioned individual. Weeks after the order, Khan was removed from his post via a vote of ICC member states following sexual assault allegations, which he has repeatedly and vehemently denied.

Trump’s executive order came immediately following a White House visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is one of the subjects of the ICC’s investigation. In November 2024, the court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, and three senior Hamas leaders. All three Hamas leaders have since been killed by Israeli forces during military operations in Gaza.

Under the terms of the order, all non-U.S. individuals and their family members who provide any support to ICC investigations into U.S. citizens or U.S. allies are subject to sweeping sanctions: their assets held within U.S. jurisdictions or the global U.S. dollar-based banking system are frozen, and they are barred from entering the United States.

This new lawsuit marks the second major legal challenge to the Trump administration’s ICC sanctions policy. In July, two other advocacy groups — Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), founded by the late journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (TAAG) — filed a separate suit in a New York federal court seeking an immediate injunction to halt enforcement of the sanctions. That suit was triggered after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a Wall Street Journal opinion column explicitly stating the administration’s goal to “dismantle the [ICC] brick by brick.”

In their Tuesday statement, the four new plaintiffs emphasized that Trump’s claimed authority for the sanctions rests on a fabricated national emergency with no factual basis. They outlined the direct harm the policy has already inflicted on their work: the sanctions have prevented the groups from continuing or launching core activities, including serving as legal representation for war crime victims, submitting legal and policy briefs to the ICC, collaborating with Palestinian human rights organizations on litigation and advocacy, conducting research into human rights violations, and delivering humanitarian aid to affected communities.

The Trump administration has a long record of targeting groups and officials involved in international legal action against Israel. Last year, the administration imposed sanctions on multiple Palestinian human rights organizations, many of which rely on support from U.S. experts and donors. It also sanctioned unnamed officials from the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization for their work bringing Israeli war crime claims before international courts, with the State Department claiming the officials were “undermining the prospects for peace.”

In his executive order, Trump justified the sanctions by claiming the ICC has “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Neither the U.S. nor Israel is a party to the Rome Statute, the 2002 treaty that established the ICC based in The Hague. Both countries have consistently opposed the court’s 2021 investigation into alleged Israeli crimes in Palestinian territory, which was opened by former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

The court gained jurisdiction over the case after the State of Palestine formally acceded to the Rome Statute in 2015, a step that allows the ICC to investigate alleged crimes committed by Israeli individuals in occupied Palestinian territory, including Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Both the U.S. and Israel reject the court’s jurisdiction, arguing they do not recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, and that Israel should be allowed to conduct its own investigations under the complementarity principle outlined in Article 17 of the Rome Statute. Trump’s executive order repeated these claims and labeled the November 2024 arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant an abuse of judicial power.

In his widely cited opinion piece last month, Rubio doubled down on the administration’s hostility, arguing that the ICC’s purported oversight of U.S. military and law enforcement operations represents an unacceptable overreach that threatens U.S. sovereignty. He claimed the court was waging a de facto war against the U.S., and noted bipartisan opposition to the court among U.S. policymakers, while avoiding any direct mention of the outstanding arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The ICC was originally founded in 2002 to hold perpetrators accountable for mass atrocities after genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

The Trump administration’s campaign against the ICC has already had ripple effects beyond the Israeli-Palestinian context. Earlier this year, the European Union warned that the U.S. sanctions could severely disrupt all of the court’s ongoing investigations, which currently cover 16 conflict zones around the world including Darfur, Ukraine, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Myanmar.

Last month, the U.S.-backed interim government of Venezuela formally withdrew from the ICC, a move the State Department publicly praised as a key step forward in U.S.-led efforts to dismantle what it calls the “corrupt and worthless” court. The State Department criticized the ICC’s investigation into former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro — who was seized during a U.S. military incursion into the South American country in January 2026 — claiming it had produced no meaningful results. In its statement on the withdrawal, the State Department repeated U.S. claims that the ICC wastes resources investigating officials from countries with competent domestic judicial systems that never accepted the court’s jurisdiction, calling the court’s actions “blatant overreach, political bias and selective enforcement” that render it uncredible, non-independent, and illegitimate.

In a startling, recently aired Monday interview, former Fox News prime-time conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has made an explosive accusation: that Israeli agents with close ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were the source of a false claim that Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. President Joe Biden, had content documenting child abuse on his widely circulated 2020 leaked laptop.

Carlson told Hunter Biden during the conversation that the false allegation of child abuse material on the laptop did not originate with Russian actors, as was widely claimed by U.S. intelligence officials years ago. Instead, he said, the claim was brought directly to him by individuals connected to Netanyahu’s inner circle. “The claim that there was material involving the abuse of minors on the computer came from the Israelis. I’m just telling you that they came to me with it, and that’s how I know it,” Carlson stated during the interview.

The controversial laptop story first emerged in the final weeks of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a race that saw Joe Biden defeat incumbent Donald Trump. The chain of events began in April 2019, when Hunter Biden left a damaged Apple laptop and an external hard drive at a Wilmington, Delaware computer repair shop owned by John Paul Mac Isaac. The Federal Bureau of Investigation took possession of the device in December 2019, months before the story broke publicly.

In October 2020, right-leaning New York Post published a series of stories based on emails pulled from the laptop, which detailed Hunter Biden’s business ties to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm that had appointed Hunter to its board of directors while his father served as vice president under the Obama administration. Beyond business records, the laptop contained personal content: videos showing Hunter smoking crack cocaine, engaging in sexual activity, and soliciting female sex workers. Throughout the first term of Joe Biden’s presidency, these explicit photos and videos circulated widely online, with repeated coverage from Fox News and the New York Post. Hunter Biden has never denied the authenticity of the content documenting his drug use and sexual encounters, though no credible evidence has ever emerged to support the child abuse claim that Carlson now addresses.

Carlson’s accusation upends years of mainstream U.S. intelligence framing that cast Russian misinformation as the source of the false child abuse allegation. Carlson argued that the false claim was part of an Israeli misinformation campaign, and that Washington insiders were aware of the Israeli role, but political pressure to avoid any criticism of Israel pushed officials to incorrectly pin the blame on Moscow. “They (Israel) were behind it. I felt like everybody in Washington knew it, but there was so much pressure not to criticise Israel in any way that they just said, ‘It’s the Russians, it’s the Russians,’” he said. When pressed on possible Russian involvement, Carlson acknowledged that Russian actors may have played a secondary role, but insisted that Israeli agents were the primary force pushing the false claim directly to him when he was still a top host at Fox News in 2020. Carlson also admitted he never disclosed this alleged Israeli connection during his original coverage of the laptop story while at the network.

In a striking alignment with Carlson’s allegation, Hunter Biden said he has not reached definitive conclusions about who originally orchestrated the laptop leak, but he agreed that multiple actors were involved in spreading the device’s content. These actors, he said, include Russian operatives, domestic U.S. political opponents of his father, and what he described as a “Netanyahu operation centre, the Israeli side.”

Both Carlson and Hunter Biden joined in harsh criticism of the Israeli prime minister. Hunter Biden went so far as to say, “If pointing out that Benjamin Netanyahu is evil incarnate is antisemitic, then I don’t know what to tell people anymore.”

In the tense standoff between China and Taiwan that has escalated steadily since 2016, a vulnerable community of more than 360,000 people finds itself squeezed between competing geopolitical forces and growing suspicion over their loyalty. These are the so-called ‘mainland spouses’ — people born in mainland China who gained Taiwanese residency and citizenship through marriage to Taiwanese citizens, and they have become a new flashpoint as cross-strait relations deteriorate.

The latest high-profile clash over the status of mainland spouses centers on Li Chen-hsiu, who made history as the first mainland-born lawmaker to earn a seat in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan through marriage-based immigration. Just one day after Li was sworn into office in February, she faced intense questioning from authorities over her nationality, personal identity and loyalty to Taiwan. After two months of gridlock and public controversy, she was forced out of office, leaving the community without legislative representation.

In an interview with the Associated Press in July, Li credited Taiwan’s open democratic system and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) for giving a first-time political candidate the opportunity to serve. But escalating fears of a potential Chinese military invasion of the self-governing island have reshaped Taiwan’s policy toward this community, reversing decades of incremental reforms aimed at integrating mainland spouses into Taiwanese society.

The split between China and Taiwan dates back to the end of China’s civil war in 1949, when the defeated Nationalist Party retreated to the island, establishing a separate government that Beijing still claims as part of its territory. For nearly four decades after the split, all cross-strait contact was completely banned. It was not until 1987 that Taiwan lifted restrictions, allowing residents to visit family members on the mainland for the first time, opening the door to cross-strait marriages.

Tensions have risen sharply since Tsai Ing-wen, an independence-leaning president, took office in 2016. Beijing cut off all official communication with Taipei, and has since ramped up military pressure, conducting daily naval and air exercises near Taiwan. It has also waged a global diplomatic campaign to isolate the island, poaching its few remaining international allies and blocking its participation in global intergovernmental organizations, alongside sustained misinformation campaigns targeting the Taiwanese public.

Against this backdrop, suspicion of mainland spouses’ allegiances has grown on the island. Most recently, a New Taipei court sentenced the head of a nonprofit supporting mainland spouses to seven years in prison on charges of spying on behalf of Beijing and interfering in Taiwanese domestic politics.

The community of mainland spouses spans multiple generations and diverse backgrounds. The earliest large wave of cross-strait marriages came in the decades after 1987, when aging Nationalist veterans who had never married in Taiwan returned to mainland China to meet and bring back spouses. Seventy-two-year-old Mi Zhengrong is one of these early arrivals. Mi, a native of China’s Hubei province, met her first husband — a veteran who fled to Taiwan in 1949 — through a family introduction. The couple married and lived in mainland China for years before moving to Taiwan in 2002, after her husband expressed a desire to spend his final years on the island. After her first husband passed away 12 years later, Mi married a Taiwanese neighbor, caring for him full-time for nearly a decade until he became paralyzed.

Mi now faces financial precarity: she is just 13 days short of the 10-year marriage threshold required to claim her late second husband’s government pension, after authorities initially approved the benefit before reversing their decision. She currently survives on roughly 10,000 New Taiwan Dollars ($330) per month, a third of which goes to rent. Even so, Mi says she has no desire to return to mainland China, echoing a sentiment shared by many in the community.

For years, the Taiwanese government gradually reformed its policies to integrate mainland spouses, cutting the waiting period for citizenship and opening up access to formal employment. But in the wake of rising cross-strait tensions, the government has reversed course and rolled back many of these integration measures. Last spring, Taipei deported three mainland spouses who had publicly advocated for forceful unification between China and Taiwan on social media. The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), Taiwan’s top body governing cross-strait policy, said the women posed repeated threats to national security and social stability. Immigration authorities have also ordered roughly 12,000 mainland spouses who already hold Taiwanese citizenship to provide formal proof that they have canceled their household registration in mainland China, threatening to revoke their Taiwanese citizenship if they fail to comply.

In Li’s case, government officials argue she failed to meet two key requirements: she did not submit formal documentation proving she had renounced her Chinese citizenship, and missed the deadline to prove she had held only single nationality for 10 consecutive years, as required for legislative candidates. Li counters that she has held Taiwanese citizenship since 1999 and canceled her mainland household registration the same year, meaning she meets all legal requirements. When the political impasse dragged on in April, the TPP expelled Li from the party, and the government subsequently tightened eligibility standards for mainland-born legislative candidates. A MAC spokesperson defended the decision, insisting there were no political motivations behind the move.

However, many legal scholars argue the government is selectively enforcing laws to target mainland spouses amid rising anti-China sentiment. Bruce Liao, an immigration law professor at National Chengchi University, says that in recent years, Taiwanese authorities have misinterpreted and distorted existing immigration laws to target this vulnerable group. “You can’t move against the Mainland, but you can bully the ‘mainland spouses’ here, and use them to create hostility,” Liao explained.

Other analysts defend the government’s approach as a reasonable national security measure. Yen-Tu Su, a researcher at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, notes that the government has a clear obligation to protect national security, and is granted reasonable leeway to assess potential threats to public safety and social order.

Even before the current wave of tension, mainland spouses faced formal legal discrimination compared to foreign spouses marrying Taiwanese citizens. By law, mainland spouses must wait six years to apply for Taiwanese citizenship, two years longer than the requirement for foreign spouses from other countries. They also must hold Taiwanese citizenship for 10 years before they can apply for government jobs, while foreign spouses can apply for most entry-level government positions immediately after gaining citizenship.

For many mainland spouses, the constant suspicion over their loyalty is a daily burden. Shangguanluan, a Chinese writer and activist who moved to Taiwan with her Taiwanese husband in 2021, says she is repeatedly questioned about whether she acts on orders from the Chinese Communist Party or works as a spy. While she acknowledges that Beijing actively seeks intelligence sources in Taiwan, she argues mainland spouses are far from ideal targets. “If they want some core secrets, the people who are most convenient targets for them, are people who are closest to the secrets, in Taiwan’s defense, or in tech — Taiwanese businessmen, or academics, or some institutional head,” she explained. “On the list of valuable targets for information, there’s no room for ‘mainland spouses.’”

As New Zealand approaches its November 7 general election, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has emerged from a second leadership challenge in four months with a declaration that he retains the full backing of his ruling center-right National Party. Facing growing public and intra-party speculation over his grip on the leadership, Luxon called an emergency three-hour caucus meeting on Wednesday to address the unrest, emerging to reaffirm his party’s unity and electoral ambitions.

The latest bout of leadership uncertainty stems from a string of missteps by the 56-year-old former chief executive of Air New Zealand, which have compounded existing voter frustration over the country’s underperforming economy. Earlier this month, Luxon sparked widespread anger among New Zealand’s small business community when he used a public speech to accuse local business owners of holding a “parent-child mentality” toward the central government and urged them to “be adult”, claiming businesses relied too heavily on state handouts. He was quickly forced to issue an apology, acknowledging that thousands of business owners were already grappling with severe economic hardship.

Last week alone, Luxon faced another wave of backlash when he revealed on live radio that he was open to holding a national referendum on New Zealand’s electoral system – a proposal he had not discussed or coordinated with his own party colleagues ahead of the public announcement.

These controversies have come as the country grapples with sustained economic stagnation, which has eroded public support for Luxon’s administration. Unemployment has climbed to 5.6%, an 11-year high, and the government has failed to deliver on the core 2023 campaign promises that brought Luxon to power: cutting the cost of living and reducing personal and business taxes.

A 1News Verian opinion poll published the same morning as the caucus meeting underscored the depth of Luxon’s political slump, with his approval rating as preferred prime minister dropping to 17% – the lowest point of his tenure. Even with the decline, however, polling data still puts him ahead of all other potential challengers for the top job.

Wednesday’s caucus vote means Luxon has survived a confidence vote, clearing the immediate threat to his leadership four months before the country heads to the polls. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Luxon struck a confident tone, saying “I have the full support of our caucus. Our caucus is united, and it is determined to win this election.” Political analysts will continue to monitor whether the resolution of internal leadership tensions will be enough to reverse the National Party’s sliding poll numbers ahead of the critical November general election.