A well-staged visit to the Forbidden City; adoring crowd, a fawning host in the form of Premier Li Keqiang; a rare opportunity to address the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party: a departure from protocol in breaking bread with a retired leader; half a step forward in keeping the disputed border quiet. Prime […]
In an unprecedented tour also locking in energy deals with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, Xi has consolidated Chinese power in Central Asia as Beijing looks to reconfigure its economy based on cleaner, more diversified energy sources amid rising overall demand for fuels. But the impacts are expected to reach much farther and wider than […]
The leaders of India and Pakistan have pledged to work together to halt a recent upsurge of violence in Kashmir, according to senior officials. Read Here – BBC Read Here – The Daily Times, Pakistan
No, it’s not the potential handshake between U.S. president Barack Obama and Iran‘s new president Hassan Rowhani (which didn’t ultimately pan out)—it’s the meeting of Pakistan‘s new prime minister Nawaz Sharif and India‘s outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh that’s set to take place this weekend following this week’s United Nations General Assembly activity. Read Here […]
Iran‘s growing influence in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003 has been cause for enormous concern for many in the Middle East and beyond. But a growing economic rivalry between Tehran and Baghdad has attracted little attention. Read Here – The National
On March 22nd, shortly after assuming the post of President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping headed off to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Observers were watching the two leaders closely, looking to divine whether or not they could overcome past divisions to achieve a new level of cooperation in bilateral ties. What […]
The reason why Xi has chosen Russia as his first state visit is simple and clear: to raise China-Russia cooperation to a new level and inject new vigor into bilateral relations by continuing with the past and opening up the future,or, as Putin put it, to vigorously promote cooperation and people-to-people exchange between the two […]
In the last two years India and Pakistan have managed to rebuild ties after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks struck a devestating blow to bilateral relations between the two countries. However, the escalation of tensions over the latest incident on the Line of Control (LoC) threatens this normalization of ties. In 2012, after much discussion and deliberation, both countries […]
A question about historical precedents for China’s rise landed in my reader mailbag last week. “What,” my correspondent asked, “is the better optic for looking at China today — Bismarckian/Wilhelmine Germany, or post-Meiji Japan? Or both?” Both! Forced to choose, though, I think Imperial Germany supplies more useful indices for plotting China’s trajectory. Someone should really […]
LESS than a week after the biggest shuffle of China’s leaders in a decade, the prime-minister-in-waiting, Li Keqiang, set tongues wagging with a speech about the country’s economic development. A government news-agency gushed that if his words could be summed up in four syllables, they would be “reform, reform”; if in six, then “reform, reform, […]
looking beyond borders 