Since the 1950s, China has effectively used the doctrine of non-interference to guide its foreign policy agenda in the developing world. In its recent economic and diplomatic engagements in Africa, the policy has come under intense scrutiny and censure as Beijing attempts to strategically navigate the contours of resource acquisition alongside south-south solidarity with its […]
The 2012 farming season may be in its waning days, but the consequences of this year’s drought, the worst of its kind in 25 years, are yet to be known. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the drought will push retail food prices up by between 3% and 4% in 2013. That’s a higher-than-average […]
Throughout the U.S. presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic political operatives have strived to articulate major foreign-policy distinctions between President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Several close foreign-policy watchers, however, have struggled to identify any such differences. The final presidential debate on Oct. 22 finally cemented what has been apparent to many over the course of the campaign: […]
China shuffled three senior military officials amid political horse-trading at the highest echelons of the Communist Party before a once-a-decade leadership transition next month. General Ma Xiaotian, the army’s deputy chief of staff, was named to lead China’s air force, while Zhu Fuxi, former director of the air force’s political department, replaces Tian Xiusi as political […]
AFTER giving a speech at a business conference in London a young analyst chatted with investment executives in the audience, then followed two of them to a nearby hotel lobby. Over glasses of Chablis the executives raved about their company’s worldwide network of extravagantly decorated offices and their fat annual bonuses. Then they offered the […]
In the last half century, East Asia emerged as the uber-performer on the global economic stage. The various countries in the region found success with substantially different systems: state-led capitalism in South Korea, Singapore and Japan; wild and wooly competitive, entrepreneur-led growth in Taiwan and Hong Kong; and more recently, what Deng Xiaoping once described as […]
Over the past several years, the most talked-about trend in the global economy has been the so-called rise of the rest, which saw the economies of many developing countries swiftly converging with those of their more developed peers. The primary engines behind this phenomenon were the four major emerging-market countries, known as the BRICs: Brazil, […]
If every modern president needs a creation myth, then Xi Jinping‘s begins on the dusty loess plateau of northwest China. It was here that Xi spent seven formative years, working among the peasants and living in a lice-infested cave dug into the silty clay that extends around the Yellow River. Gradually, the selfless peasants and the unforgiving […]
THE Venerable Lobsang Norbu, a 77-year-old monk who presides over one of several Tibetan Buddhist hilltop monasteries in Arunachal Pradesh, in north-eastern India, recalls the “very horrible” war that China launched 50 years ago this week. Flares lit up the night, then gunfire erupted. Terrified villagers and monks fled through the pine and rhododendron forests […]
As the rebellion in Syria languishes on with little attention from the international community, aconfidential report authored by the U.N. Security Council’s Group of Experts was leaked to Reuters. This is not the first time such a “leak” has occurred, which implicates the credibility of the Group of Experts or the U.N. itself. The report allegedly confirms […]
