An important part of China’s external policy has been its relations with its western neighbors in Central Asia. Since 2013, China has actively aligned its interests with the multivector foreign policies of Central Asian states. This synergy, alongside growing demand for China-Europe overland transport, has enabled car the electronics manufacturers to bridge their regional value chains into a unified Eurasian network. The latter situation has become more difficult since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. China has remained on good terms with Russia without condoning the invasion of an independent country, but this has made it difficult to collaborate in establishing new routes through Central Asia and to Europe, which threaten the future pre-eminence of the Russian routes. This article starts by explaining the demand for rail services to connect regional value chains in East Asia and in Europe and, in the value chain context, the importance of trade costs in terms of time and reliability as well as finance. The rail Landbridge between Europe and China flourished between 2010 and 2022 despite potentially adverse shocks following Russia’s 2014 absorption of Crimea and the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and ensuing sanctions proved more challenging, and traders sought new routes south of Russia and north of Iran, the so-called Middle Corridor. This search was embraced by the European Union and by the Central Asian and South Caucasus countries along the corridor, as well as Türkiye, but China was hesitant in 2022 and 2023. The article asks why China became more embracing of the Middle Corridor in 2024 and 2025 and what the prospects are likely to be.
How does status explain Chinese foreign policy in the era of great-power politics? This article addresses the question, focusing on the issues of status motive, attribution, and strategy. With the end of US engagement toward China, China’s status relations with the West have turned competitive. China’s status motive is to control its international environment in order to maintain a strategic opportunity for sustained growth and continued rise. In the face of a worsening external environment, Beijing has adjusted its status strategy, seeking to build legitimacy, control, and influence in key communities of states – namely the United States and the West, neighboring Asian countries, and the Global South. China’s status quest has remained highly domestically oriented and instrumental — the goal is opportunity, not hegemony. Contrary to the prevailing narratives that China has arrived as a great power poised to displace US hegemony, this research uncovers the duality in China’s status as both a rising and newly arrived great power. The status duality has driven Beijing’s strategic resolve and calculus.
This essay elaborates on the argument that, while leaders may appear powerful, the deeper logic of international relations — shaped by geography, political economy, institutions, and historical trajectories — imposes strict limits on what they can ultimately accomplish. Leaders can accelerate, delay, distort, or personalize change — but they rarely determine its underlying direction. Ultimately, the world evolves through technological advancement, historical trends, and structural forces, and leaders are, at best, actors, interpreters, and navigators of those forces.
The European Union (EU) is a major market, and an important technology partner for both the United States and China. It has a long and deep history with both, and figures in Washington’s and Beijing’s geopolitical calculations. While it is admired and taken seriously as a cultural and intellectual power, its hard assets in terms of military and use of force are less impressive. The EU has articulated strategic visions since 2000 which have tried to resolve the tensions in its aims balancing between the United States and China, as the two major powers have grown increasingly competitive and difficult with each other. These have so far proved to be of limited effectiveness. One of the perennial issues for the EU is what its identity is, and what weight to give to its values and worldview as it relates to the other great powers. This essay gives a historical account of how Europe has related to China in the past, how this informs its posture today in the decades since it has been the EU, and what sort of views China and the United States have of it in an era of sharper contention and deeper geopolitical rivalry. It concludes by arguing that a fundamental paradigm change is happening with the second Trump administration, and that Europe needs to become a wholly different actor, and prepare for completely different strategic thinking on its relations with the world’s two superpowers.
Existing data point to a dramatic increase in the proportion of Australians who believed China was likely to become a threat in the period of 2022–2025. Media have long been found to be pivotal in shaping public perceptions of foreign countries. It is therefore important to ask how the media decide which stories about China to highlight and how those stories are told. This article adopts a tripartite framework — securitization, speech act, and agenda-setting — to explore how media shapes the Australian public’s perception of China as a high-level threat. It does so by conducting a critical analysis of major news and current affairs reports, documentaries, and analyses published in Australia’s most influential media outlets from 2021 to the present on the theme of China as a military threat. The analysis identifies a number of ways in which Australian media create and sustain the salience of the China threat by amplifying the voices of political and security elites, and normalizing a pre-war emergency discourse. The analysis points to a return of the Cold War–style journalistic tradition in which the framing of China tells us as much about Australia’s anxieties, alliances, and strategic positioning as it does about China’s intentions.
This article revisits the strategic ambiguity policy of the United States toward Taiwan, particularly under the Trump administration, examining its implications for regional stability and Taiwan’s hedging strategies. It analyzes how the Trump administration’s approach, characterized by both increased support for Taiwan and transactional diplomacy, has influenced perceptions of US reliability and complicated cross-strait relations. The research investigates the shift in Taiwanese public opinion, revealing a growing consideration of the rise of hedging as a strategic response. The findings suggest that the Trump administration’s policies have contributed to a more uncertain environment, prompting Taiwan to adopt a hedging strategy that incorporates both anti-China and pro-US elements. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of understanding these dynamics for policymakers seeking to navigate the evolving landscape of US-Taiwan–PRC relations under the Trump administration 2.0.
Co-existence of border tensions between India and China following the Galwan incident of June 2020 with a constant rise in their bilateral trade has intrigued experts. In this backdrop, this article attempts to examine this puzzle in contemporary India-China relations using the framework of “Strategic Patience” as an integral part of Indian and Chinese civilizations. It interrogates the assumption that the concept of Strategic Patience is proving increasingly critical in shaping contemporary India–China relations. Can it explain their cautious and measured responses to bilateral, regional and global issues, especially to their border skirmishes that co-exist with flourishing economic relations? Also, what makes Strategic Patience of India and China a unique driver behind their piecemeal approach to resolving their border tensions and other irritants? This article explores whether their sustained restraint is simply guided by the pragmatic prudence of their national leaders or whether it forms an integral part of their civilizational orientation for optimal outcomes for both sides.
The aim of this article is to systematically analyze the strategies of the United States, China, and Japan, namely the “Pacific Three.” Its focus is on the dynamics of the relationship (such as competition, cooperation, and conflict) between the Pacific Three, examining each country’s strategic considerations and the policymaking process. Under the “micro–macro linkage” approach and combining external and domestic factors, 1 this article first looks at five factors causing the change of relationships in international politics and then examines three stages of historical interaction (with eight junctures) between the Pacific Three. It further depicts power transition scenarios between the rising power (China) and the dominant power (the United States), and discusses the complicated relations between China and Japan, so that we can get a comprehensive understanding of great-power strategies, as well as the US–China–Japan triangle.
This article analyzes the classic subject of the times and leaders. Using historical examples of China and elsewhere, the article tries to delineate the dynamic relationship between leaders (heroes) and the macro historical structure and environment under which they act. On the basis of historical analysis, this article discusses the performance of Donald Trump as an atypical U.S. president since he started his second term revealing both his potential and limitation in shaping the world transformation.
This paper examines ASEAN's role in the ongoing transition of regional order amid intensifying U.S.-China rivalry. It argues that both major powers are seeking to court ASEAN as part of their broader contest for leadership in the Indo-Pacific, recognizing that regional followership is essential to sustaining their strategic influence. Drawing on the three-pillar framework of international order, the paper contends that ASEAN's limited military capacity constrains its influence in the power-based pillar. However, ASEAN can still exert meaningful agency through institutional balancing, particularly within the institutional and normative pillars of the regional order. Specifically, ASEAN needs to pursue a strategy of selective engagement, i.e., promoting inclusive institutions, avoiding exclusive ones, and acting as a bridge-builder between competing powers, even as this task becomes increasingly challenging. The paper concludes that ASEAN's greatest test lies in maintaining its internal cohesion and unity. While the United States and China will remain the primary architects of the regional order transition, ASEAN's role as a stabilizing and mediating force should neither be overlooked nor underestimated.
The COVID-19 epidemic, which broke out in the city of Wuhan, Province of Hubei, China in late 2019, was finally over in 2023, after almost four years. The objective of this study is to summarise the history of the evolution of this epidemic in China, over both time and space, with the focus on the cumulative population infection rates, the cumulative population death rates (adjusted for possible “excess deaths” as necessary), and the cumulative mortality rates of those infected. Based on these data, four distinct phases of the COVID-19 epidemic may be identified in China: the Beginning Phase, the Controlled Phase, the Explosive Phase, and the “Living with the Virus” Phase. The strategies, policies and measures used in China to control the epidemic are also examined. Overall, the COVID-19 epidemic must be considered to have been reasonably well managed in China, with its national cumulative population infection rate and population death rate among the lowest in the world, even after adjustment for “excess deaths”.
Central Asia, located in Eurasia’s hinterland, is one of China’s primary foreign policy destinations. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has emerged as the most important means of furthering relations between China and the five Central Asian republics. A new phase in China’s foreign policy towards Central Asia was marked by the launch of the BRI, which sparked a new round of cooperation between China and the Central Asian republics. Since the implementation of the BRI in 2013 China’s foreign policy has prioritized Central Asia as part of the initiative. China’s economic interests and influence in the Central Asian republics have increased as a result of the initiative’s implementation. In the era of the multipolar world order in which China as one of the major powers is playing a central role, Beijing’s international policy includes its bilateral and multilateral relations with the Central Asian states. This paper aims to discuss how the Chinese BRI has reconfigured China’s exchange relations and influences on Central Asian countries, as well as how the BRI has worked in each country in the region.
This paper compares the ongoing ascent of AI to a geological unconformity, constituting a potential break or watershed in the continuum of human events, with significant implications for the Sino-US relationship, the geopolitical landscape, and global society as a whole. It touches on some of the constituent technical components underpinning the development of AI capabilities and highlights how the full flowering of AI may irrevocably alter the global chessboard and the notion of control for both the US and China. China and the US may each become bystanders in an increasingly AI-centered world. The paper then discusses the patchwork of regulatory efforts undertaken by various world actors, emphasizing how underlying societal values are likely to lead to disparate outcomes and resulting regulatory confusion. The commentary further underscores how competing development platforms, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the US Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and the G7’s Global Partnership for Infrastructure and Investment are becoming vehicles for engaging in the struggle for global primacy and influence in respect of standards for technology, infrastructure, and global governance, writ large. Finally, the paper portrays the current moment as an unprecedented inflection point in which the US and China and the global community as a whole have a stake. Faced with the “unconformity” likely to be caused by AI, this paper makes a measured plea for targeted and realistic cooperation between the US and China on these issues, outlining a multi-pronged agenda encompassing AI and other pressing geopolitical matters while acknowledging the current obstacles to promoting such a constructive dialogue. The overriding point is that AI may turn out to be a somewhat exogenous, even alien, variable beyond the power of either the US or China to control, and that in such circumstances, realistic steps toward some degree of common or coordinated regulatory control constitute not just a desirable, but also a rational and increasingly necessary approach toward harnessing the power of AI and thereby promoting global welfare.
The provision of more and better public goods is part of the Chinese efforts to emphasize the quality rather than the quantity of economic growth. Provision of public goods such as education, public health, elderly care, environmental preservation, protection, and restoration, basic research, infrastructure, social safety net, and alleviation of poverty has been vastly expanded in China since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, with significant positive results in all these areas. The provision of public goods has also raised the potential GDP of the Chinese economy through its effects on increasing the aggregate demand for investment and consumption, the productivity of the labor force, and the rate of return on other fixed-asset investments. Public goods are by their very nature mostly “local”, and their provision is consistent with the Chinese “dual-circulation development strategy” with primary focus on domestic circulation. The provision of public goods also constitutes a form of redistribution in kind, e.g., clean air and water, which can be enjoyed by everyone, and hence also directly advances the goal of ”common prosperity”. Despite significant increase in the degree of income inequality in China since the mid-1980s, the welfare of all Chinese people has improved significantly. However, the provision of public goods frequently results in negative value-added at market prices, and therefore reduces, rather than enhances, the rate of growth of measured GDP. Finally, increasing the provision of public goods can be a significant source of growth of the domestic aggregate demand for both consumption and investment, over and above what increases in household income alone are able to provide. Maintaining an adequate growth of aggregate demand is essential for continued Chinese economic prosperity.
The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a large project aiming at improving regional cooperation through better connectivity among the countries lying on the ancient Silk Road and beyond. Since Iran is one of the countries in the BRI, the Sino-Iranian cooperation in the framework of BRI can enhance the economic, political, security, military, cultural, and diplomatic ties between the two nations. In particular, both China and Iran attach great importance to cultural exchanges based on BRI’s aims and policies which helps in deepening mutual understanding between the two nations and promoting cultural cooperation of Beijing and Tehran. Indeed, Belt and Road Initiative would greatly contribute to boosting the cultural interaction and exchanges between China and Iran.
This paper discusses how China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) can shed light on the issue of urbanization and agricultural development in Southeast Asia. The BRI is often understood to mean infrastructure projects, such as the building of high-speed railways and modern ports. This inter-pretation does not fully take into account the potential economic prospects between China and the BRI-participating countries. By revisiting Harvard-trained Economist Chang Pei-kang’s pioneering theory on Agriculture and Industrialization, we argue that agriculture rather than urbanization needs to be considered as the foundation for sustainable economic development in Southeast Asia. Advancements in agricultural development through BRI projects will improve not only the livelihoods of rural farmers in Southeast Asia, but also our global ecosystems. Turning the focus to agriculture can assist Southeast Asian countries in exploring their own development paths and avoiding repeated setbacks from fresh financial and global crises.
The current geopolitical environment is characterized by a multiplicity of actors, both state and non-state, a growing constellation of multifaceted and often contradictory issues and interests, and an increased velocity wrought by technology and the resulting compression of physical and cyberspace, all of which are churning in a type of expanding “geopolitical metaverse”. In parallel, states find themselves “sharing” sovereignty in a co-dependent relationship with the private sector, particularly as large technology concerns increasingly control key vectors of national power. These dimensions equate to a significant disruption of the international environment. This paper examines the impact of this dynamic on the evolving Sino-US relationship, with ASEAN asserting its “centrality” as a key regional player and intermediary. The ultimate goal of this commentary is to put forward certain targeted suggestions as to how the Sino-US relationship can move toward a new equilibrium amid the prevailing climate of disruption, using an enlightened approach to conditional transactional undertakings and an astute engagement with ASEAN and other regional instances to facilitate constructive compromise and the adoption of an agenda focused on stability, modernity, and economic uplift.
This paper examines the case studies of three East Asian entities (Thailand, Myanmar and Hong Kong) battling both the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic as well as socio-political unrest simultaneously. While Thailand/Myanmar and Hong Kong are different in geographical/demographic sizes and the former two are sovereign states while the latter is a Special Administrative Region (SAR), they have similar challenges in experiencing cosmopolitan pro-democracy movements (made up of young activists) pitted against the governments determined to maintain control in what political scientists may characterize as illiberal political systems. While Thailand and Myanmar may be much larger in terms of geographical/demographic sizes, much of the recent political activism occurred in the capital city of Bangkok (a city of about 8 million people) and Yangon (also having about 7 million in population and being the former capital of Myanmar before the military elites had moved the capital to Naypyidaw in anticipation of political unrests). In the case of Myanmar, the demonstration and protests have effectively spread nationwide. Both cities are similar in size to Hong Kong that is with approximately 7 million inhabitants. Both Bangkok and Hong Kong are also cosmopolitan cities with high exposure to global commerce, ideas and tourism while Yangon is a fast-developing urban commercial capital city. In terms of ideologies and political systems, both Bangkok and Hong Kong have nominal liberal democratic systems that have limits imposed on political freedoms while Myanmar was liberalizing and democratizing before the military coup on February 1, 2020. These similarities make them suitable candidates for comparative studies, including analyzing their differences in managing the political challenges.
