You can’t understand the world without understanding China. No country has had a less predictable, more dynamic impact on the world in the past 40 years — and the next 40 will be no different.
The U.S. deal that allowed Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou to leave Canada and escape extradition was swiftly followed by China’s release of two Canadian detainees, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. The apparent prisoner swap resolved a pressure point in U.S.-China relations, but only heightened concerns about China’s “hostage diplomacy.”
Taiwan's main opposition party is electing a new chairperson on Saturday. Incumbent Johnny Chiang and former chairman Eric Chu are the frontrunners, but keep an eye on Chang Ya-chung, who favors reunification with China.
Since mid-August, flows of foreign aid have been interrupted to Ethiopia’s war-torn Tigray region and to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The U.S. has threatened sanctions to try to pressure a resolution to the Ethiopia conflict, and is reluctant to lift restrictions on the Taliban. China has objected to all foreign sanctions, calling them unilateral interference.
Prior to the Trump administration, top government officials from the world's two largest economies used to meet annually in a massive forum. Susan Thornton, Rorry Daniels, and Daniel Jasper appeared on the Sinica Podcast to discuss a new study that pushes back on the view — now popular in Washington — that the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) was unproductive.
"The intentions behind the China Initiative might have served a purpose, but the program that is the China Initiative is a racial profiling witch hunt for theater and show that is ruining careers and turning peoples’ lives upside down."
At the UN General Assembly, China’s leader pledged to end support for coal projects overseas in favor of green and low-carbon energy. But while the single sentence effectively marked the end of coal financing abroad, China continues to build new coal power plants at home.
Last week, Beijing applied to join the CPTPP, a trade club formerly known as the TPP, which the U.S. originally designed to isolate China. Trump tore the deal up and it moved on without the U.S., but now China wants to join.
The U.S., Australia, and Britain’s new trilateral military alliance, designed to counter China partly by giving nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, came as a shock to the EU and France.
It sounds like the name of a frequent flyer program, but the new European initiative, “Global Gateway,” seeks to compete with the BRI by creating “links and not dependencies.” Can a Western “values-based” approach really hope to compete with the cold cash and hard infrastructure capacity from China?
A day after Joe Biden had an apparently amicable phone call with Xi Jinping, the Biden administration was reported to be considering multiple moves that would strain U.S.-China relations.