Free Republic

The reelection of President Barack Obama and the convening of China’s 18th National Congress marks a new era for U.S.-China relations. On November 29, the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy hosted Jeffrey Bader for a public forum to discuss these and related issues facing the Obama and Xi administrations. Bader is the John C. Whitehead senior fellow in international diplomacy at the Brookings Institution. He served as senior director for East Asian affairs on the National Security Council during President Obama’s first term, and is the author of Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asian Strategy. In...

An American businessman arrested in Communist China over a decade on apparently flimsy charges of drug trafficking will be put to death, Chinese government officials have announced. Mark Swidan, a Houston, Texas businessman, was arrested in November 2012 and sentenced to death in 2018 on charges he was in China to smuggle illegal drugs. John Kamm, chairman of the Dui Hua human rights foundation, tells Newsweek “the only ‘evidence’ against him is that Swidan once visited a factory where Chinese authorities allege the meth was manufactured, and that he had been in a room rented by another person where drugs...