Ever since its founding in January 1995, the World Trade Organization has been the focus of global protest. While its defenders claim that it is intended to spread the world's wealth through lower tariffs, its detractors insist it is a tool of the United States and other wealthy nations, serving to widen the gap between the world's rich and poor.

This report presents a new, path breaking model of global trade as a tool to analyze the potential impacts of the negotiations and underlying economic interests of the WTO’s diverse members.

Harvard's Elizabeth J. Perry argues that the patterns and promises of Mao's revolution continue to loom large in the beliefs and behaviors of protestors and state officials alike.

Minxin Pei examines the sustainability of the Chinese Communist Party's strategy of pro-market economic policies under one-party rule. China is trapped in partial economic and political reforms, and because the Communist Party must retain significant economic control to ensure its political survival, gradualism will ultimately fail.

Authoritarian leaders around the world have recently started to crack down on democracy-promotion efforts in their countries. The Bush administration's pro-democracy bombast has not helped matters, but has contributed to the false idea that political liberalization is a U.S.-driven phenomenon.

Joshua Muldavin, of Sarah Lawrence College, argued that China's rapid growth during the past two and a half decades has been built upon a base of environmental destruction and social decay.

Several developments has turned the tide against the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The political fortunes of the DPP, which rose to power in 2000 by championing a new Taiwanese identity and recklessly challenged the fragile status quo in the Taiwan Strait, has been waning. Its leadership has lost credibility, both with a majority of Taiwan's voters and with Washington.