I Am a Great Believer in China Story——Keynote Speech at LSE SU China Development Forum 2014(Excerption)

正Today as Chairman of the 48Group and the author of the blog chinaglobalimpact.com,I am here with 62years of collected experience on China,40 years of it in my own work of commodities’trading with China,marketing their consumer goods in the UK and USA markets,and 30 years’experience of advising major global corporations on their China strategies.     

The End of Russian Power in Asia?

A U.S. initiative treating Russia as a serious East Asian partner, engaging in a real dialogue on security threats there, and a strong public expression of U.S. willingness to invest in the Russian Far East (RFE) in return for real guarantees of that investment, could well elicit a favorable Russian response. Such an initiative should also encourage concurrent Japanese and South Korean investment there, the author argues.     

The Law and the Statuesque

Law and literature, an exemplary product of the textual turn in the study of culture, has found itself challenged by the more recent visual turn in critical thought. However, debate hitherto has been largely based on a two-dimensional approach to the visual. By going beyond the metaphor of the ‘legal screen’ in favour of a theory of the ‘statuesque’, this essay adds a new dimension to the way we think about the force of law in culture. Drawing on eighteenth-century and contemporary aesthetic theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century public art, the article presents an account of the political aesthetics of law in which a place for the possibility of justice may be made.     

Justifying forceful resistance to ethnic separatism: The case of Russia versus Chechnya, 1994–96

This article examines how states try to mobilize mass and elite support for wars against ethnic separatists, and what factors affect their success in this effort, using the 1994–96 Russian‐Chechen conflict as a case study. It argues that governments fighting ethnic separatists usually appeal to three sets of normative principles to gamer support for this effort: democracy and rights, law and order, and territorial integrity and unity. After showing how the Yeltsin government relied on these principles in its campaign to justify the war, the article examines and explains the extent to which these appeals were successful.     

Discolouring Democracy? Policing,Sensitive Evidence,and Contentious Deaths in the United Kingdom

This article examines recent United Kingdom government proposals for secret inquests, which, it is argued, are part of a general push for secrecy discernible across common law jurisdictions, and which include developments such as increased recourse to sensitive evidence in forensic settings and the normalization of intelligence‐led policing. While the push for secrecy is justified by national security claims, the article shows that in cases of contentious death involving police, the issue is less about national security and more about the use of intercept evidence, covert surveillance, and intelligence‐led policing, all of which have implications for police trust, accountability, and reputation management.