When thousands of South Africans took to the streets last month to demand President Jacob Zuma’s ouster, an unprecedented show of popular discontent in a country where Zuma’s party has ruled uninterrupted since 1994, some took their frustrations to what they consider the real seat of power: the Gupta family.
China’s interest in Latin America is both economic and strategic. It was the accelerating Chinese economy’s voracious appetite for raw materials that keyed its entry to the region, a land of plenty when it comes to natural resources. Iron, soybeans, copper, and oil make up the bulk of Chinese imports from the region. In turn, securing access to Latin American markets for the export of Chinese manufactured products became a priority as well.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Russia and the United States agreed to swap the northwestern corner of the continent for $7.2 million, ending imperial Russia’s involvement in North America. At about two cents an acre, the Alaska purchase was a pretty good deal.
Now what to do with it. The Arctic is open for business, and everyone wants a piece. A council at Davos lays down some rules.
Japan’s expanded diplomatic overtures can be explained in two main ways. First, they could be seen as a means of balancing against China. If true, this would effectively be a form of unwitting indirect assistance to Russia, whose own traditional hegemony in Eurasia is being seriously challenged by China’s growing trade ties and economic presence in the region. Alternatively, Japan might simply prefer to see a little more diversity of interest in Central Asia, with itself, India, and the United States competing for influence with the dominant Russia-China rivalry.
Map of Central Asia
While everyone’s anxiously watching and analyzing the events unraveling in the South China Sea, there’s another resource conflict involving China that also deserves attention. In the Himalayas, China and India are competing for valuable hydropower and water resources on the Yarlung Tsangpo–Brahmaputra River. The dispute offers some important lessons for regional cooperation (on more than just water), and highlights what’s at stake if China and India mismanage their resource conflict.
Their existence is palpable across locations of every size in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. The initials of the several Baloch insurgent groups sprayed on brick walls and mud houses across the country’s southernmost region remind us of an insurgent movement the world still knows little about.
The China-India relationship is still riddled with suspicion from the 1962 war, and a smoldering border dispute and rivalry in the maritime sphere complicates relations further. But as Western forces are drawn down in Afghanistan at the end of this year, cooperation may be the best way to establish the regional stability that the country needs for its future growth and security.
Why would China fear a nation it could traumatize tomorrow by dumping its debt or shifting its iron ore, coal and copper orders elsewhere? That’s a good question for the United States to ask itself.
Despite the fact that the free trade zone port of Gwadar in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan has been an unprofitable enterprise with operational control now in Chinese hands, its potential remains. If anything, the development of the deep ocean port and an associated international airport, as well as the creation of a transport corridor connecting Gwadar to China’s easternmost province of Xinjiang, is a game changer for the Central Asian region, writes Christopher Ernest Barber
