Jason Morgan

Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan

Washington’s yes-men in Japan

It was nighttime in Davos, 8:31 on January 18 to be exact. Japanese journalist Ganaha Masako had been standing out in the cold for three hours near the entrance to a building which, she had heard, was being used as a venue for a World Economic Forum event that evening. Ganaha had picked up on some additional chatter. Klaus Schwab, the head of the WEF, was rumored to be inside. It was a long shot, but Ganaha wanted to ask Schwab some questions about globalism. And then, suddenly, Schwab appeared. Fleshy cheeks jiggling slightly as he shuffled along the snow-dusted sidewalk, he stepped cautiously out of the WEF event forum with a few handlers. Ganaha pointed her camera at Schwab and asked him for an interview. He ignored her and kept shuffling along.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is coming

From our UK edition

This month, at the 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist party, Xi Jinping was elected to a third term as chairman. ‘The New Mao’ – so has rung the common refrain. It’s an entirely accurate assessment. The very existence of the two-term-limit precedent that Xi has now broken was set by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, in 1982. The reasoning behind the term limit was to prevent the cult-of-personality chaos that Mao and his sycophants had whipped up during his untrammelled, ruler-for-life tenure at the helm of the Chinese state. Deng wanted to make China rich enough so its citizens wouldn’t care that they were not free. To do that, he needed law and order, not proto-woke Red Guards beating up middle school teachers.