International Issues

In Beijing workers obliterated the studio of Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist and dissident. Mr Ai has been living in exile in Berlin since 2015, after years of skirmishes with authorities over his politically charged art and advocacy. The demolition came without warning, putting some artwork at risk, but was not necessarily a political act. The lease had expired, and the area is due for commercial development, including shopping malls. If the destruction of the studio were an installation, it...

TIANJIN, a northern mega-city, has produced some of China’s wittiest comedians. It is a good thing that its 15m residents have a sense of humour. Their hometown was, at points over the past decade, the fastest-growing of China’s 31 provincial-level regions. Since the beginning of last year it has been the slowest (see chart). Businesses joke that the sole part of the local economy that is expanding these days is the value of assets seized from corrupt officials. The city’s...

TOBACCO was new to England in the 17th century, but even then, smoking had plenty of critics. The most famous was King James I, who in 1604 described smoking as “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmful to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke and stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomless”. The king increased the import tax on the “noxious weed” by 4,000%. Sometimes, …

SOMETHING strange is happening to Canada’s religious profile. As in many western countries, the share of Canadian citizens who call themselves Christian is in long-term decline. Those who profess “no religion” (which does not necessarily mean an indifference to the spiritual) is rising. But compared with people born in Canada, newcomers to the country are much more likely to practise a faith, regardless of whether they were devout back in the homeland. Young immigrants are more inclined to engage in …

IN JAPAN it is hard to avoid the disturbing spectacle of young girls being treated as sex objects. Rorikon, an abbreviation of “Lolita complex”, is ubiquitous. In M’s Pop Life, a sex shop in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, known for its pop subculture, life-size models of girls, their breasts at various stages of puberty, are openly on sale. Elsewhere big-bosomed cartoon girls are splashed across posters; children (or grown-ups made to look like children) pose in magazines in bikinis. Rorikon is …

WHEN Americans in high places sound the trumpet for global religious liberty, a sceptical world often wonders whether their main concern is the freedom of their own particular brand of faith or liberty in purer sense, covering all manner of beliefs and non-beliefs.  Such questions were in the air this week as President Donald Trump’s administration organised an eye-catching diplomatic event in Washington, DC: a three-day “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom” which brought together foreign ministers and champions of faiths …

THE one-child-per-couple policy was horrific for women in China. Many were subjected to forced sterilisations or abortions. Newborn girls were killed, removed by family-planning officials or abandoned by parents desperate that their one permitted baby be a boy. Women from neighbouring countries suffered, too, as victims of human trafficking; a skewed sex-ratio made it more difficult for young men to find Chinese wives. So the government’s announcement in late 2015 that it was relaxing the policy, after 35 years, was...

“IT SEEMS Beijing does not have this problem,” says a father leaving the Capital Institute of Paediatrics with his two young boys on a sweltering afternoon. The parent, who gives his name as Mr Wu, says Beijing health officials have promised worried local people that they did not purchase any of the medicines involved in China’s latest scandal over defective childhood vaccines—namely some 110,000 doses of rabies vaccine for which production data were allegedly faked by Changchun Changsheng Life Sciences,...

IT IS becoming a commonplace that in matters of belief and religion, Western societies are disintegrating into micro-communities that struggle to understand each other. A Babel-like array of introverted faith groups and a secular majority struggle to co-exist, without knowing or even wanting to know much about one another. Awareness of that danger underlies a report published this week by two influential figures in the field of religious education in England: Charles Clarke, a former education secretary, and Linda Woodhead, …

“I CAN’T believe the censors let this one slide”, remarks an online commentator on Zhihu, a question-and-answer forum. He was referring to “Dying to Survive”, a dark comedy released on July 5th which is on track to become one of China’s highest-grossing productions of all time. The film, which raked in a record $200m in its opening weekend on a budget of just $15m, is based on the true story of Lu Yong. Mr Lu was arrested in 2013 for...