Chinese Governance System

China renewed its threats Wednesday to attack Taiwan and warned that foreign politicians who interact with the self-governing island are playing with fire. A spokesperson for China's Taiwan Affairs Office said the country was recommitted in the new year to safeguarding sovereignty and territorial integrity and smashing plots for Taiwan independence on the self-governing democracy that separated from mainland China in 1949. The malicious support for Taiwan independence among anti-China elements in a few foreign countries are a deliberate provocation, Ma Xiaoguang said at a biweekly news conference. China views Taiwan as a Chinese territory that must be brought under Beijing's control, by force if necessary. A string of visits in recent months by foreign politicians to Taiwan, including by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and numerous politicians from the European Union, spurred displays of military might from both sides. This week, Taiwan's military is staging drills intended to

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin vowed to help Asian nations push back against Chinese "bullying," describing the efforts as necessary to prevent a repeat of the Ukraine crisis in the Pacific

Xi has been calling for "sinicisation" of religions, re-orienting them to function under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

Chinese development model has produced a rapid pace of economic growth over the last three decades and lifted hundreds of millions of people above the poverty line