China wants to invest in big connectivity projects in Nepal but prefers to bring its Asian competitor, India, on board. Some Nepali and Chinese scholars see this as an opportunity for trilateral cooperation between Nepal, India, and China, but Indian policymakers and academics have not shown much interest.
China’s investment flows into the United States face a bleak outlook as a result of mounting bilateral economic conflicts and US attempts to limit access for Chinese capital, a new report warns. The US was working on stricter scrutiny to restrict access because of national security concerns, the Rhodium Group said in a report.
China’s ambitious plan to recreate the old Silk Road trading routes across Eurasia and Africa is facing a serious financing challenge, according to the country’s senior bankers and government researchers.
The Balkans have recently seen a spike in Chinese investment activity similar to that being witnessed across Central Asia and Central and South America. While concerns about the geopolitical implications of this new trend are legitimate, all strategic calculations need to take into account the kind of influence an investment portfolio can buy, as well as the behavioural pattern of the investor and the investment recipient that is known from the past.
China’s trillion-dollar signature foreign-policy project, the Belt and Road Initiative, is often lampooned as just a fuzzy concept with little to show for it on the ground. But in bustling ports from Singapore to the North Sea, state-owned Chinese firms are turning the idea into a reality with a series of aggressive acquisitions that are physically redrawing the map of global trade and political influence.
In a sense, India’s foreign policy is still passive. The hallmark of power is not that countries will take your money and use it to build refineries, or that foreign leaders will visit and eat your food at interesting summits about maritime security. The real test of power is whether a country can make other countries do what it wants. And for all the activity involving India this past week, none of it suggests that India is amassing that kind of power. Instead, India is thwarting Chinese power. It is doing this because it wants to, but more than that, because other countries want it to. India is playing on the world stage, and that is notable – but it is playing at the invitation and with the blessing of others. It is not master of its fate.
According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, the funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait have a combined $2.8 trillion in assets under management. These governments are using their national wealth as a strategic tool of power projection as never before and blurring the line between economic and political decision-making.
Over the past year, Chinese Australians who form the largest overseas Chinese community in Oceania, have found themselves at the centre of unwanted attention and scrutiny from the Australian government, intelligence services and media. In what appeared a concerted campaign, some of the community’s prominent business leaders were accused of acting as possible agents of the Chinese government by seeking, at its behest, to influence Australia’s domestic politics through political donations.
Saudi Arabia laid out the biggest spending plan in the kingdom’s history in absolute terms when the government published its 2018 budget in late December. After two years of austerity measures and budget deficits following the oil price dive in 2014, the sizeable amount of slated expenditures for this year could seem counterintuitive.
On the first day of the New Year, the Chinese and Sri Lankan flags were hoisted to the same height over the Hambantota port in the Indian Ocean nation. It was the first time the Chinese flag had risen over the loss-making facility which Sri Lanka formally handed over to a Chinese state firm in a US$1.12 billion deal. The port deal is just one of a series of infrastructure forays China has made into Sri Lanka in a region usually regarded as India’s backyard.
