Former foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu will become China’s ambassador to the United Nations headquarters in New York, one of the country’s most prestigious overseas posts, according to diplomatic sources. Ma, 54, returned to Beijing last week after a 20-month stint as the country’s top envoy to the UN in Geneva. As China’s point man at […]
More than a decade after they were created, Confucius Institutes have sprouted up at more than 500 college campuses worldwide, with more than 100 of them in the United States—including at The George Washington University, the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. Overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education known colloquially […]
Members of China’s top anti-corruption agency gathered in Beijing on Thursday to set the agenda for the year ahead, with the final preparations for the creation of a “super” graft watchdog expected to be top of the agenda. The three-day closed-door meeting of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) is the first since its new […]
The natural question is then: Why China? Why should China be that external actor? The reason is that China supplies some critical, missing input. That input is deep pockets — someone has to pay a large initial cost to jump-start the building of the infrastructure network, and the actor needs to be able to absorb […]
China started building its third aircraft carrier, with a hi-tech launch system, at a Shanghai shipyard last year, according to sources close to the People’s Liberation Army. One of the sources said Shanghai Jiangnan Shipyard Group was given the go-ahead to begin work on the vessel after military leaders met in Beijing following the annual sessions […]
The People’s Liberation Army Air Force of China and its sister branch, the PLA Naval Air Force, operate a huge fleet of around 1,700 combat aircraft—defined here as fighters, bombers and attack planes. This force is exceeded only by the 3,400 active combat aircraft of the U.S. military. Moreover, China operates a lot of different aircraft types that are […]
Barack Obama’s foreign policy was characterised as leading from behind. Trump’s doctrine may come to be understood as retreating from the front. Trump has severed American commitments that he considers risky, costly, or politically unappealing. In his first week in office, he tried to ban travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries, arguing that they pose a […]
China’s economy begins 2018 facing what its own leaders call three years of “critical battles.” Those fights to tackle domestic debt, poverty and pollution pose a hat-trick of risks to the world’s No. 2 economy even before higher interest rates and trade war threats from the U.S. are taken into account. While the nation is starting […]
In the more than four decades since Chinese leader Mao Zedong and US President Richard Nixon re-established diplomatic relations between the two countries – after a 25-year hiatus caused by Washington’s support for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War – relations between the world’s most populous and most powerful nations have seesawed. Read […]
When a rising power challenges an incumbent one, war often follows. That prospect, known as the Thucydides trap after the Greek historian who first described it, looms over relations between China and the West, particularly America. So, increasingly, does a more insidious confrontation. Even if China does not seek to conquer foreign lands, many people […]
looking beyond borders 