Alex Lo

1 week ago | scmp.com | Alex Lo

Never assume, North American teachers of my generation supposedly liked to tell their students, because it makes an ASS-of-U-and-ME. Perhaps Father Robert Sirico, now well into his seventies, has forgotten that sound piece of advice. The influential US Catholic author and educator has counselled local firebrand Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, who is in Rome after attending the funeral of Pope Francis, to “defect”. Seriously, are we still in the Soviet era?

1 week ago | scmp.com | Alex Lo

Is a trade war a real war, or is it only a metaphor? Going by Chinese state media, the country is drawing inspiration from Mao Zedong’s series of speeches, collectively published as the famous On Protracted War. In it, the Great Helmsman counsels against both optimism for a quick victory and defeatism. Rather, there is a need for a realistic assessment of the stages that must be reached before a decisive battle can be risked to achieve ultimate victory.

1 week ago | scmp.com | Alex Lo

The Western news media have gone out of their way to report on every mass protest against the governments in Hungary and Serbia. But when there was a huge rally against the government in Taiwan, there was not a word. The lack of reporting last week was positively wilful, considering tens of thousands took to the streets of Taipei as part of an opposition rally against the island’s president, William Lai Ching-te, and his increasingly, unpopular Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

2 weeks ago | scmp.com | Alex Lo

By securing a full term as Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney’s election victory says a lot about the interesting times that we – both Canadians and non-Canadians – live in. Like the other English-speaking Commonwealth countries, he faces a United States that is no longer their protector but predator, and a China that is both a threat and a trade partner. Still, Carney has much to thank Donald Trump for.

2 weeks ago | scmp.com | Alex Lo

History both rhymes and repeats. We are in the middle of one such episode. China’s ambassador to the United States Xie Feng recently likened US President Donald Trump’s economic policies to the disastrous protectionism of the Great Depression. The example he cited was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, introduced in the US at the start of the Great Depression.