China

In a speech on the eve of the Olympics, George W. Bush prodded China on human rights.

Well, sort of. That's what's in the news, but in reality Bush was (to use one of his father's words) "prudent" in his comments about human rights in China. His speech was released 18 hours before he actually gave it (probably with even more back-channel advance notice to the Chinese); it was delivered not in Beijing but in Bangkok; and it was followed by a string of events that spotlighted abuses in Burma rather than China. The Chinese responded with boilerplate about how the United States shouldn't interfere in China's internal affairs. Mission accomplished. On to the U.S.-China Olympics basketball matchup!

With four days left before opening ceremonies, China's much-hyped weather modification program shows no sign of having improved the weather.

Judging by James Fallows's latest photos, Beijing's skies are the color of rice water, and they aren't trending in the direction of clarity. The public pronouncements of the weather-bureau spokesmen, once bold and Promethean, are now humbler: "The Beijing Olympic weather center will issue monitoring and weather warning and will update the weather information on a rolling basis," said Wang Jiangjie, who just last January boasted of having a team of weather modifiers to clean up the skies for the Games. Her colleagues allude vaguely to techniques that are supposedly still up the Chinese meteorological sleeve, but even they note that these techniques are "only on the stage of experimentation."

Beijing imposed heavy security on the Olympic torch’s passage through Xinjiang Province.

It isn't only Tibetans who have risen up against Chinese rule, but also Turkic Muslim Uighurs in China's far western province of Xinjiang. The Chinese have reacted by arresting Uighur activists in the Islamic center of Kashgar, and accusing Uighurs of ties to international terrorism.The Uighurs, in return, demand an independent state: East Turkestan. Even as China prepares to showcase its growing strength and dynamism at this year's Olympics, the situation in Xinjiang, as much as the one in Tibet, demonstrates how it has yet to consolidate its border areas, with profound implications for China, the United States, and the world.

Congress grills pharmaceutical firm Baxter International and the Food and Drug Administration about tainted drugs that killed 81.

For those scared or curious enough to pay attention, this week's hearings offered a jarring look at how globalization is affecting the medicines we take. True, some testimony was predictable: the FDA denied that it could have averted the tragedy with an earlier (and required) inspection of the suspect Chinese factory; Baxter's CEO played the victim card, claiming that his firm's heparin, an anticoagulant, was the target of a deliberate adulteration scheme. (The Chinese government, meanwhile, argued that the faulty ingredients weren't to blame for the deaths.) But the statement of David Nelson, the senior investigator of the committee holding the hearings, sandblasts the varnish off such evasions, especially Baxter's dubious behavior, and is worth a read.

South African dockworkers refused to unload 3080 cases of weapons and ammunition from a Chinese vessel. The shipment was destined for Zimbabwe, possibly for use against opponents of President Robert Mugabe.

What could be more stirring than the sight of a few thousand Durban longshoremen standing up against one of Africa's great despots? Consider me duly stirred. But this triumph of organized labor in South Africa has a worrisome side as well.

In Taiwan's presidential contest, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang defeated Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party by an overwhelming margin.

The Kuomintang, perhaps the strangest, most resilient political organization in history, is back in yet another guise. Ma Ying-jeou is an affable, U.S.-educated, pro-market moderate. His most distinguishing feature might be his unwillingness to use scabrous rhetoric to denounce his opponents -- highly unusual in Taiwan's shall-we-say robust public discourse. MORE

The Kingdom of Bhutan, for over a hundred years an absolute monarchy under the Wangchuk Dynasty, held its first elections.

"All things," Lord Buddha reminds us, "are ephemeral." The two Buddhist autocrats who saw their power eroded this week in South Asia might have kept this advice in mind. From his Dharmasala lair, His Holiness the Dalai Lama lamented helplessly as the violent protests in Lhasa -- and the crackdown by Beijing -- proceeded apace, not obviously affected by his pleas for calm. And Jigme Khesar Namgyel, son of the Scourge of Thimpu, watched his subjects vote for a national assembly for the first time, in a ballot he himself decreed, but that still diminishes his authority. MORE

Violent protests against Chinese rule erupted in Tibet, and the government locked down the city of Lhasa.

In some ways the Chinese government is patient, subtle, and sophisticated. Although it never faces a judgment at the ballot box, in domestic affairs it often acts as if it were "accountable," trying to address and fend off whatever is the latest source of popular concern. Inflation, economic inequalities, pollution, snow-borne travel disasters -- these and other problems can lead to shifts in policy that rival those in any country. And when it comes to police-state controls, the government usually pushes just far enough to get what it wants, without pushing too far and generating too much backlash. But none of this is true when it comes to a part of Chinese policy now most in the world's eyes: how it will respond in Tibet. MORE