Faced with rising labor costs at home and negative perceptions about their employment practices in Africa, Chinese companies are setting up new factories on the continent and hiring more Africans.
The specter of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s sweeping anti-graft campaign has in recent months ousted officials of all ranks and even banned authorities from purchasing ostensible symbols of corruption.
Few would dispute that Chinese society suffers from a serious trust problem. After surviving crafty scams and shoddy products for years, Chinese people have become guarded with strangers and cautious in business dealings.
Pollution that is easily perceptible in China's rivers and urban air has gotten a lot of attention in recent years.
Now a less obvious environmental concern with equally serious repercussions—soil contamination—is getting the attention it deserves thanks to a first-of-its-kind nationwide study that documents a heavy toll on China's farms, forests, and grasslands.
Twenty-first century rivalry between the United States and China will be as much about economic might as military power.
With a $1 billion oil rig the size of a football field, China has literally laid down a new marker in its ambition to dominate the South China Sea, only weeks after Barack Obama's tour of the region.
The state sector has provided essential organization, capital and the ability to survive turbulence collectively. That’s the Chinese edge, like it or not.
One of the world’s longest-running bull markets finally seems to be stalling, with broad consequences for China’s economy and possibly its politics as well.
China's coal consumption contributes one-fifth of the world’s total emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, which, if it continues, will make it change “almost impossible."
Carlyle A. Thayer is Emeritus Professor, The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. Thayer is a Southeast Asia regional specialist with special expertise on Vietnam. He is the author of Southeast Asia: Patterns of Security Cooperation (Canberra: Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2012). He writes a weekly column on Southeast Asian defense and security affairs for the The Diplomat. He has held senior appointments at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London; Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu; School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; Center for International Affairs, Ohio University; Australian Command and Staff College; and the Center for Defence and Strategic Studies at the Australian Defence College. Thayer was educated at Brown, holds an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from Yale and a PhD in International Relations from The Australian National University. He was in Hanoi when the Chinese oil rig crisis off Vietnam first broke out in May 2014.
