Sri Lankan Poll Upset a Blow to China’s Indian Ocean Plans

Natalie Obiko Pearson
Bloomberg
Mahinda Rajapaksa, who tightened ties with China during his decade-long rule, conceded defeat today in Sri Lanka’s closely-fought presidential election. His successor Maithripala Sirisena used his campaign to criticize the island nation’s increasing...

U.S. Blames North Korea for Sony Cyber Attack, Vows ‘Consequences’

Aruna Viswanatha and Steve Holland
Reuters
It was the first time the United States had directly accused another country of a cyber attack of such magnitude on American soil and sets up a possible new confrontation between longtime foes Washington and Pyongyang.

As Obama Opens to Cuba, China Experts Remember Benefits from U.S. Engagement

Simon Denyer
Washington Post
As Washington moves to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba after decades of trying to isolate and overthrow the Castro regime, Chinese people and China experts in the United States have been reminded of a much more momentous opening 36 years ago that...

Sinica Podcast

12.12.14

Band of Brothers: China and South Africa

Kaiser Kuo & Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
Pomp and ritual surrounded South African President Jacob Zuma's recent state visit to China, a trip that saw China roll out the red carpet in a very uncritical fashion, not often seen these days, with even Xinhua getting into the spirit of...

China vs. America: Brinkmanship and Statemanship

John Garnaut
Age
After Barack Obama's Air Force One touches down in Brisbane, and the American president fulfills the day's G20 obligations including the prime ministerial barbecue, Obama will make his way to Queensland University and deliver the sequel to...

Leaders of U.S., Australia, Japan to Meet, With Eye on China

Rob Taylor
Wall Street Journal
The meeting risks antagonizing Beijing, which bristles at perceptions that its rise in the region is being challenged, but also comes as the U.S. and Japan are working to repair ties with China.

Xi Outlines Four Expected Achievements of APEC Meetings

China Daily
China Daily
The first achievement will be the launch of the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) process, which points out the direction for Asia-Pacific cooperation, Chinese President Xi Jinping said.

China Announces Import Support Measures as APEC Leaders Arrive

Lucy Hornby
Financial Times
China tossed a bone to trading partners attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting this week by announcing a series of measures including more bank credit for high-tech imports and quicker approvals for meat and seafood shipments.

Why China Won Mexico’s High-Speed Rail Project

Clint Richards
Diplomat
Underlying Mexico’s decision to choose China, and what may have made it the only country able to meet to proposal deadline, was its decision to finance 85 percent of the project through the Export-Import Bank of China.

Culture

09.23.14

Contact Lenses

Vera Tollmann
Will we all become “Chinese?” International New York Times correspondent Didi Kirsten Tatlow ironically asked recently. The question plays both on our fears over China’s economic power and on reflections on the NSA files released by Edward Snowden...

China-Africa Trade May Be Booming, But Big Problems Loom

Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more
Trade between China and Africa will break another new record this year as it’s expected to top $200 billion. As trade continues to grow, officials from both regions frequently point to these figures as evidence of steadily improving ties. However,...

China’s New Diplomatic Strategy in Africa: Humility

Eric Olander & Cobus van Staden
Just a few weeks after Chinese premier Li Keqiang admitted that China was going through “growing pains” in its engagement with Africa, Beijing’s central bank chief, Zhou Xiaochuan, acknowledged some of the 2,500 PRC companies operating in Africa are...

Sinica Podcast

03.31.14

The World War One Chinese Labor Corps

Kaiser Kuo & David Moser from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are delighted to host Mark O’Neill, author of The Chinese Labour Corps, for a discussion of the Chinese contribution to World War One. As a comprehensive look into China’s role in The Great War, O’...

Media

03.25.14

China, We Fear You

On March 18, thousands of students began a sit-in of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan in the capital, Taipei, a historic first that has paralyzed the island’s lawmaking body. Students have amassed to protest an attempt by the Kuomintang, the island’s...

Sinica Podcast

03.17.14

Will China Dominate the Twenty-first Century?

Kaiser Kuo from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, we are pleased to present a live show recorded earlier this week at The Bookworm in Beijing, where Kaiser Kuo interviewed Jonathan Fenby, author of the book Will China Dominate the 21st Century?If you haven’t heard of Jonathan...

Viewpoint

03.06.14

Can America Win in a New Era of Competition with China?

Geoff Dyer
Beijing was in a state of heightened anxiety and had been for weeks. Each day in the run-up to the National Day parade, the security measures seemed to get a little bit tighter. Our apartment building had a distant view of Jianguomen, which is the...

The Brave Catholics of China

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
Like most pilgrimage sites in China, the shrine in the village of Cave Gulley in Shanxi province is located partway up a mountain, reachable by steep stairs that are meant to shift worshipers’ attention from the world below to heaven above...

Viewpoint

02.27.14

Why Frank Underwood is Great for China’s Soft Power

Ying Zhu
In depicting U.S. politics as just as vicious, if not more, sociopathic than its Chinese counterpart, House of Cards delivered a sweet Valentine’s Day gift to the Chinese government. The show handed the Chinese state an instant victory when the...

Sinica Podcast

01.24.14

Talking About Taiwan

Kaiser Kuo & David Moser from Sinica Podcast
This week on Sinica, Kaiser Kuo is joined by David Moser and Paul Mozur for an in-depth discussion about everyone’s favorite renegade province. This is a lively conversation that stretches from questions of Taiwanese personal identity to its media...

Far Eastern Antipathies

Paul Scheffer
Foreign Affairs
Japan must reckon with England as an eventual addition to the enormous political strength of China and Russia.

Media

01.03.14

2013, According to the Chinese Communist Party

What did the year in foreign policy look like in Chinese official circles? Divining the thoughts and motives of China’s leadership is a famously abstruse exercise even for Chinese citizens, who are often left to parse bland quotes or keep their ears...

Excerpts

01.02.14

Global Development and Investment

Elizabeth Economy & Zha Daojiong
Framing questions: In what ways do the U.S. and Chinese approaches to development and foreign investment differ? Are they evolving, and how? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each approach both to the investing country and the recipient? In...

Sinica Podcast

11.19.13

Partners and Rivals

Kaiser Kuo & Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
Few will dispute that the Sino-American relationship constitutes the most important bilateral relationship of our time, shedding a sort of lunar influence on international politics which helps shape not only the dynamic of global tensions, but also...

Culture

11.11.13

All He Needs is a Miracle

Debra Bruno
Courtesy of the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History A portrait of Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci by You Wenhui; painted at the time of Ricci’s death in Beijing, 1610. It now hangs at the Jesuit residence in Rome. It is the...

Viewpoint

11.08.13

China, One Year Later

J. Stapleton Roy, Susan Shirk & more
In November 2012, seven men were appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s supreme governing body. At the time, economic headwinds, nationalist protests, and the Bo Xilai scandal presented huge challenges for the regime. Would the...

Media

11.07.13

Chinese State Media: U.S. Bullying ‘Obsolete’

Stop being a bully, and start respecting the rule of the global village. That’s the takeaway from a November 1 editorial in Chinese state media, which castigates the United States in the wake of revelations that the NSA has tapped the phones of...

Reports

10.22.13

CCTV’s International Expansion: China’s Grand Strategy for Media?

Anne Nelson
Center for International Media Assistance
China Central Television has come a long ways since its founding as a domestic party propaganda outlet in 1958. The domestic service has been supplemented by an international service, boasting three major global offices in Beijing, Washington, and...

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Money?

Jonathan Mirsky from New York Review of Books
“China is what it is. We have to be here or nowhere.” Chancellor George Osborne, Britain’s second-highest official, was laying out the British government’s view last week, near the end of his trip aimed at selling Britain to Chinese companies...

Reports

10.01.13

China’s Absorptive State

Kirsten Bound, Tom Saunders, James Wilsdon, Jonathan Adams
Nesta
A great deal of speculation surrounds China’s prospects in science and innovation, as with other aspects of China’s development and heightened visibility on the global stage. The same pitfalls—of hype, generalization, and only partial awareness of...

Viewpoint

09.13.13

The Urgency of Partnership

Paula S. Harrell
While the media keeps its eye on the ongoing Diaoyu/Senkaku islands dispute, heating up yet again this week after Chinese naval ships and aircraft were spotted circling the area, a parallel, possibly game-changing development in China-Japan...

Reports

09.10.13

Threading the Needle: Proposals for U.S. and Chinese Actions on Arms Sales to Taiwan

Piin-Fen Kok and David J. Firestein
EastWest Institute
The sale of U.S. arms to Taiwan has been an enduring source of friction between the United States and China. To China, Taiwan is a “core” interest. Though the United States publicly committed itself, through the August 17, 1982 Joint Communique with...

Reports

09.04.13

How to Make China More Honest

Derek Scissors
The Heritage Foundation
Official Chinese economic statistics, from unemployment to arable land, are controlled by the Communist Party and therefore cannot be trusted. The prevailing American and global view of China as a rising, if presently troubled, economic superpower...

Sinica Podcast

08.16.13

David Moser Interviews Mark Rowswell

David Moser & Mark Rowswell from Sinica Podcast
If you are a long-timer in China, this is a show that needs no introduction. One of the most famous foreigners in China, Mark Rowswell (a.k.a. Dashan), shot to fame in the early 1990s after a fortuitous break on Chinese television. In this live...

Sinica Podcast

08.09.13

Alison Friedman on China and the Arts

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more from Sinica Podcast
The last ten years have seen a genuine transformation in China’s arts world, as a large sector that used to be dependent almost exclusively on government funding has been downsized into the maelstrom of the market, leaving survivors to navigate not...

Books

08.05.13

China Threat?

Lionel Vairon
From the long-term threat of nuclear war between the U.S. and China, to the disappearance of the African elephant due to Chinese demand for ivory, each week brings a new round of critique and denunciation of the risks China poses to the stability of the entire planet. While critics raise a certain number of fundamental questions that bear asking about this nascent superpower, the answers put forth are usually based on ideological or economic considerations. Lionel Vairon systematically challenges these views in this first English language edition of China Threat?With an incisive review of China’s economic strategy, deployment of resources, national defence, political reform, ethnicity and religion, terrorism, and developments in human rights, Vairon amply demonstrates that China poses no threat to the world. On the contrary, China Threat? shows that China’s peaceful rise should be a matter of positive news across the globe.  —CN Times Books {chop}

Media

07.17.13

A Minority in the Middle Kingdom: My Experience Being Black in China

In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder: “…there is no racism in China because there are no black people,” a Chinese woman was reported...

Sinica Podcast

07.05.13

Myanmar’s Uncertain Glasnost

Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
Buddhist terrorists, military juntas, resource clashes, and pro-Western democracy movements? If China has lulled you into thinking that Southeast Asia is predictable and boring, join us for this week’s discussion of Myanmar, the former client state...

Media

07.02.13

American History, Through Chinese Eyes

White male privilege, genocide against Native Americans, slavery and subsequent racial oppression, exploitation of immigrants and laborers, repression of women and homosexuals, and environmental destruction—teaching American cultural history through...

Media

05.29.13

The Graffiti Seen ‘Round the World

It’s tourist season the world over: let the shenanigans begin. After a young Chinese tourist’s defacement of an ancient Egyptian temple was photographed and shared online, the harsh backlash has gone viral in China’s blogosphere. Tea Leaf Nation...

Reports

05.06.13

Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2013

Office of the Secretary of Defense
United States of America Department of Defense
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to pursue a long-term, comprehensive military modernization program designed to improve the capacity of its armed forces to fight and win short-duration, high-intensity regional military conflict...

Environment

05.03.13

Time to End Secrecy Over Chinese Overseas Fishing

from chinadialogue
It is well-known that overseas fishing fleets are more cavalier in terms of respect for laws and regulations than their domestic counterparts. There are innumerable examples from all over the world of fishing with gears that are not part of...

Viewpoint

04.05.13

Christopher Hill on North Korea’s Provocations

Ouyang Bin
The first months of 2013 have seen a rapid intensification of combative rhetoric and action from North Korea. In the sixteen months since Kim Jong-un assumed leadership of the country, North Korea has run through the whole litany of provocations his...

Sinica Podcast

03.29.13

Xi Jinping Goes to Russia

Kaiser Kuo & Jeremy Goldkorn from Sinica Podcast
Xi Jinping’s trip to Moscow earlier this week, his first journey abroad as China’s new Head of State, has raised interesting questions about China’s ambitions in Asia, and coupled with Washington’s “pivot to Asia” is resurrecting the specter of a...

Reports

02.27.13

China’s Central Asia Problem

International Crisis Group
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China and its Central Asian neighbors have developed a close relationship, initially economic but increasingly also political and security. Energy, precious metals, and other natural resources flow into China...

Books

02.25.13

Star Spangled Security

Harold Brown with Joyce Winslow
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown served during the hottest part of the Cold War when the Soviet Union presented an existential threat to America. In Star Spangled Security, Dr. Brown, one of the most respected wise men of American foreign policy, gives an insider’s view of U.S. national security strategy during the Carter administration, relates lessons learned, and bridges them to current challenges facing America.Brown describes his part in the SALT negotiations, the normalization of relations with China, the Camp David Accords, the development of a new generation of ballistic missiles, and more. Drawing on his earlier years as the director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, as director of defense research and engineering, as Air Force secretary, and as president of Caltech, Brown uses his hard-won wisdom, especially during the painful Iran hostage crisis, to offer specific recommendations and key questions to ponder as America copes with challenges in a turbulent world.Highly readable, Star Spangled Security is for anyone wishing to better understand the debates about defense and its budget, its effect on the entire economy, and America’s relationship with allies during conflict and peace. Brown’s access to the leading forces in national security over sixty years spans ten presidents, giving the reader entrée into the inner circle of decision makers.Since leaving public office, Brown has served on the boards of directors of a dozen corporations. His unique economic, military, research, university, and government experience—at the top of all institutions he served—makes his a voice well worth heeding. —Brookings Institution Press

Media

02.20.13

On China’s Twitter, Discussion of Hacking Attacks Proceeds Unblocked

As The New York Times reported yesterday evening, U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant has just released a deeply troubling report called “Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units.” The report alleges wide-spread hacking sponsored by the...

Conversation

02.20.13

Cyber Attacks—What’s the Best Response?

James Fallows, Xiao Qiang & more
With regular ChinaFile Conversation contributor Elizabeth Economy on the road, we turned to her colleague Adam Segal, Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Segal said that “the time for...

Environment

01.23.13

U.S. Cities Suffer Impact of Downwind Chinese Air Pollution

from chinadialogue
Around 9,000 feet up, on a remote mountaintop in the state of Oregon, a group of researchers are on the lookout. It is not planes or wildlife they are tracking but pollution clouds.The monitoring site is run by Dan Jaffe, professor of atmospheric...

Books

12.12.12

China’s Search for Security

Andrew J. Nathan, Andrew Scobell
Despite its impressive size and population, economic vitality, and drive to upgrade its military capabilities, China remains a vulnerable nation surrounded by powerful rivals and potential foes. The key to understanding China’s foreign policy is to grasp these geostrategic challenges, which persist even as the country comes to dominate its neighbors. Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell analyze China’s security concerns on four fronts: at home, with its immediate neighbors, in surrounding regional systems, and in the world beyond Asia. By illuminating the issues driving Chinese policy, they offer new perspective on China’s rise and a strategy for balancing Chinese and American interests in Asia. Though rooted in the present, Nathan and Scobell’s study makes ample use of the past, reaching back into history to contextualize the people and institutions shaping Chinese strategy. They examine Chinese views of the United States; explain why China is so concerned about Japan; and uncover China’s interests in such trouble spots as North Korea, Iran, and the Sudan. The authors probe recent troubles in Tibet and Xinjiang and establish links to forces beyond China’s borders. They consider the tactics deployed by both sides of mainland China and Taiwan’s complicated relationship, as Taiwan seeks to maintain autonomy while China tries to move toward unification, and they evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of China’s three main power resources—economic power, military power, and soft power. The book concludes with recommendations for the United States as it seeks to manage China’s rise. Chinese policymakers understand that the nation’s prosperity, stability, and security depend on cooperation with the U.S, and if handled wisely, relations between the two countries could produce mutually beneficial outcomes in Asia and throughout the world. —Columbia University Press

Books

12.04.12

Tangled Titans

David Shambaugh (editor)
Tangled Titans offers a current and comprehensive assessment of the most important relationship in international affairs—that between the United States and China. How the relationship evolves will have a defining impact on the future of world politics, the Asian region, and the citizens of many nations. In this definitive book, leading experts provide an in-depth exploration of the historical, domestic, bilateral, regional, global, and future contexts of this complex relationship. The contributors argue that the relationship is a unique combination of deep interdependence, limited cooperation, and increasing competition. Never in modern history have two great powers been so deeply intertwined—yet so suspicious and potentially antagonistic toward each other. Exploring this cooperative and competitive dynamic, the contributors offer a wealth of detail on contemporary Sino-American relations unavailable elsewhere. Students will find Tangled Titans essential reading to understand the current dynamics and future direction of relations between the world’s two most important powers.—Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Books

11.09.12

Strong Society, Smart State

James Reilly
The rise and influence of public opinion on Chinese foreign policy reveals a remarkable evolution in authoritarian responses to social turmoil. James Reilly shows how Chinese leaders have responded to popular demands for political participation with a sophisticated strategy of tolerance, responsiveness, persuasion, and repression—a successful approach that helps explain how and why the Communist Party continues to rule China.Through a detailed examination of China's relations with Japan from 1980 to 2010, Reilly reveals the populist origins of a wave of anti-Japanese public mobilization that swept across China in the early 2000s. Popular protests, sensationalist media content, and emotional public opinion combined to impede diplomatic negotiations, interrupt economic cooperation, spur belligerent rhetoric, and reshape public debates. Facing a mounting domestic and diplomatic crisis, Chinese leaders responded with a remarkable reversal, curtailing protests and cooling public anger toward Japan. Far from being a fragile state overwhelmed by popular nationalism, market forces, or information technology, China has emerged as a robust and flexible regime that has adapted to its new environment with remarkable speed and effectiveness. Reilly's study of public opinion's influence on foreign policy extends beyond democratic states. It reveals how persuasion and responsiveness sustain Communist Party rule in China and develops a method for examining similar dynamics in different authoritarian regimes. He draws upon public opinion surveys, interviews with Chinese activists, quantitative media analysis, and internal government documents to support his findings, joining theories in international relations, social movements, and public opinion.  — Columbia University Press

Books

09.27.12

Restless Empire

Odd Arne Westad
As the twenty-first century dawns, China stands at a crossroads. The largest and most populous country on earth and currently the world’s second biggest economy, China has recently reclaimed its historic place at the center of global affairs after decades of internal chaos and disastrous foreign relations. But even as China tentatively reengages with the outside world, the contradictions of its development risks pushing it back into an era of insularity and instability—a regression that, as China’s recent history shows, would have serious implications for all other nations.In Restless Empire, award-winning historian Odd Arne Westad traces China’s complex foreign affairs over the past 250 years, identifying the forces that will determine the country’s path in the decades to come. Since the height of the Qing Empire in the eighteenth century, China’s interactions—and confrontations—with foreign powers have caused its worldview to fluctuate wildly between extremes of dominance and subjugation, emulation and defiance. From the invasion of Burma in the 1760s to the Boxer Rebellion in the early 20th century to the 2001 standoff over a downed U.S. spy plane, many of these encounters have left Chinese with a lingering sense of humiliation and resentment, and inflamed their notions of justice, hierarchy, and Chinese centrality in world affairs. Recently, China’s rising influence on the world stage has shown what the country stands to gain from international cooperation and openness. But as Westad shows, the nation’s success will ultimately hinge on its ability to engage with potential international partners while simultaneously safeguarding its own strength and stability. —Basic Books

Thucydides’s Trap Has Been Sprung in the Pacific

Graham Allison
Financial Times
China’s increasingly aggressive posture towards the South China Sea and the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea is less important in itself than as a sign of things to come. For six decades after the second world war, an American “Pax Pacifica”...

The New Olympic Arms Race

Ian Johnson from New York Review of Books
You can follow the Olympics two ways. First, there’s the right way: you pay attention to the athletes and root for great performances. You see them cry and hug each other in joy or look away in disgust at a bad performance. You empathize with them...

The New Great Game in Central Asia

Alexander Cooley
Foreign Affairs
In the last decade, the world has started taking more notice of Central Asia. For the United States and its allies, the region is a valuable supply hub for the Afghanistan war effort. For Russia, it is an arena in which to exert political influence...

“Winner Take All”—A China Story?

Elizabeth C. Economy
Council on Foreign Relations
It was with a mix of trepidation and anticipation that I read Dambisa Moyo’s newly-released book, “Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What it Means for the World”: trepidation because my colleague Michael Levi and I are currently...

Books

05.22.12

Every Nation for Itself

Ian Bremmer
Forget the G-7 and the G-20; we are entering a leaderless "G- Zero" era—with profound implications for every country and corporation. The world power structure is facing a vacuum at the top. With the unifying urgency of the financial crisis behind us, the diverse political and economic values of the G-20 are curtailing the world's most powerful governments' ability to mediate growing global challenges. There is no viable alternative group to take its place. The United States lacks the resources and the political will to continue as the primary provider of global public goods. China has no interest in accepting the burdens of international leadership. Europe is occupied with saving the eurozone, and Japan is tied down with its own problems. Emerging powers such as Brazil, India, and Russia are too focused on domestic development to welcome new responsibilities abroad. The result is a G-Zero world in which no single country or bloc has the political or economic leverage-or the desire-to drive a truly international agenda. Ian Bremmer explains how this will lead to extended and intensified conflict over vitally important issues, such as international economic coordination, financial regulatory reform, trade policy, and climate change. We are facing a time of profound uncertainty. Bremmer shows who will benefit, who will suffer, and why this increased state of conflict is both inevitable and unsustainable. —Penguin Books Limited

Media

05.18.12

Drunken Brit Assaults Chinese Woman in Beijing

Bo Wang
A drunken foreigner was caught sexually assaulting a Chinese woman in Beijing near the Xuanwumen subway station. Pedestrians stopped him and it ended in a fight. This video shows the initial confrontation with the foreigner and then jumps to the...

Books

05.11.12

Midnight in Peking

Paul French
January, 1937: Peking is a heady mix of privilege and scandal, lavish cocktail bars and opium dens, warlords and corruption, rumors and superstition—and the clock is ticking down on all of it. In the exclusive Legation Quarter, the foreign residents wait nervously for the axe to fall. Japanese troops have already occupied Manchuria and are poised to advance south. Word has it that Chiang Kai-shek and his shaky government, long since fled to Nanking, are ready to cut a deal with Tokyo and leave Peking to its fate. Each day brings a racheting up of tension for Chinese and foreigners alike inside the ancient city walls. On one of those walls, not far from the nefarious Badlands, is a massive watchtower—haunted, so the locals believe, by fox spirits that prey upon innocent mortals.Then one bitterly cold night, the body of an innocent mortal is dumped there. It belongs to Pamela Werner, the daughter of a former British consul to China, and when the details of her death become known, people find it hard to credit that any human could treat another in such a fashion. Even as the Japanese noose on the city tightens, the killing of Pamela transfixes Peking. Seventy-five years after these events, Paul French finally gives the case the resolution it was denied at the time. Midnight in Peking is the un-put-downable true story of a murder that will make you hold your loved ones close, and also a sweepingly evocative account of the end of an era. —Penguin Books