In the wake of the 2021 coup, Myanmar experienced a renewed civil war that has fragmented the country along a myriad of old and new conflict lines. Despite the high-intensity violence across many regions of the country, China is still pursuing an ambitious connectivity project under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) is meant to connect Myanmar to the Chinese market and boost Myanmar's industrial development. However, the challenging post-coup environment has required significant changes in China's approach to local infrastructure development and empowered a new set of subnational actors on both sides of the border. This article analyzes how CMEC has fared since the coup, and how the fragmentation of Myanmar has gone hand in hand with that of Chinese agency in the country. Contrary to prevailing descriptions of the BRI as a coherent, strategic, and top-down project, we argue that the case of Myanmar exposes the degree to which it is shaped by local interests and circumstances, and the limits of centralized BRI implementation. Finally, it is likely that adjustments in Chinese policy triggered by the situation in Myanmar will have more long-term consequences for the future of the BRI, specifically a more direct involvement in local security efforts and greater engagement with local authorities beyond the central government.

In the ten years since its inception, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted significant attention for its transformative impact on geopolitics, international developmental aid and the environment of member countries. A comparatively understudied aspect is the clustering of BRI investments in conflict-affected states. Here, the BRI's impact is potentially even greater, but highly ambiguous: on the one hand, it is providing much-needed development financing to countries with unattractive risk profiles, thus potentially contributing to their stabilization. On the other, this influx of capital risks exacerbating antagonisms over resource distribution and project control, creating additional grievances resulting from a lack of oversight, and reigniting conflicts along existing political fault lines. This article examines the BRI's transformative impact on conflict-affected states, by focusing on effects on local conflict dynamics, the legitimacy of governing institutions and outright political violence. It establishes general patterns of BRI investments and their conflict exposure, and investigates these dynamics in more detail through case studies on Pakistan and Myanmar. Finally, it analyzes which BRI-specific practices have shaped its conflict impact, and how these could be improved.

Pakistan occupies an elevated role in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and hosts its so-called flagship project, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Existing literature has often interpreted this project from a geopolitical perspective, as a vehicle through which a rising China projects influence on a peripheral country and advances its own centrality in international affairs. While such motivations certainly played a major role in getting the project off the ground, they are not the sole determinant of its design, or the heated controversies it triggered within Pakistan. This paper seeks to capture both dimensions by analysing the development of CPEC, and the handling of the conflicts it sparked, through a lens of overlapping centre-periphery relations: one between China and Pakistan at the international level, and one between Islamabad and peripheral regions and groups within the country. I argue that this model best captures the pivotal position and resulting agency of national governments in shaping local BRI implementations. It also shows how the BRI is not a straight case of Chinese influence radiating outwards; rather, contestation by local actors in turn forces adaptations in Chinese foreign and security policy.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine has not only shaken the foundations of the European security order, but will also have long-term repercussions on the future of international relations. While Ukraine is enjoying universal backing from Western states, Russia has received at least rhetorical support from its “strategic partner” China. Influential voices have cited this constellation as proof of a new global confrontation between democratic and authoritarian camps. Amidst the current “sea change” in German foreign and defense policy, calls are mounting to make this assumed systemic confrontation its new baseline. In this brief article, we aim to sketch a more complex picture of the Sino-Russian partnership, as revealed by the war in Ukraine. Based on an analysis of Chinese and Russian official statements and expert commentaries published since shortly before the beginning of the war, we find that it is fundamentally shaped by three factors: a partial and short-term overlap of interests, an underdeveloped normative basis further challenged by Russia’s belligerent behavior, and a pronounced reactivity towards US security agency. Accordingly, closer Sino- Russian alignment is not based on ideological fraternity or a symptom of renewed systemic bipolarity in global politics. Viewing it as such is also a bad guideline for practical policy, as it ignores the differences in both countries’ attitudes towards the status quo of global order, and risks pushing them closer together in further challenges against it.

Over the past fifteen years, China has turned from a bystander of international peacekeeping operations (PKO) to one of their biggest contributors, often explained in terms of norm adoption or securing Chinese overseas investments.This article sketches the historical evolution of China’s approach to peacekeeping through a role theory prism, explaining policy shifts through changing Chinese self-images and desired roles on the international stage. By studying influential academic and official discourses surrounding Chinese engagement with PKOs, it details processes of role contestation, and how peacekeeping became served to translate newly adopted roles into concrete policies. Finally, the article closes by examining China’s growing ambitions as a peace-bringer and the emergence of an indigenous doctrine on the peace/development nexus that could undergird future Chinese agency in conflict settings.

This article explores the growing role of think tank experts in Chinese media coverage on international issues and determines the degree to which voices in this spectrum diverge from each other as well as the official line espoused by China’s central media organs. It combines a large-sample sentiment analysis of commentaries published by three major institutes that have developed significant public profiles with an in-depth discussion of selected pieces written by especially prolific experts. Based on the results, I argue that Chinese expert commenters sometimes enrich media coverage and show a substantial variety in opinions among them, but prevailing political constraints, skewed incentives, and a slanted media environment keep them from realizing their full potential as public intellectuals. This limits their usefulness both for improving policy outcomes and for managing public expectations about China’s rise.

This paper reviews contending realist assumptions about domestic and systemic impulses for balancing behavior, derives a set of corresponding hypotheses for state actions and submits them to a statistical large-n analysis for testing. A total of 18 highly conflict-prone dyads of states are observed over lengthy periods of time in order to gather data for a regression analysis of the effects of different impulses on both the external and internal balancing behavior of the weaker states. In accordance with the results, it is argued that domestic (or unit-level) factors are highly important in explaining the scope of balancing and often exert a stronger influence than do power gaps between states.

Many new think tanks have emerged in East Asia in recent decades. The region is home to highly diverse and in some cases very vibrant environments for think-tank development. While there are some commonalities among think tanks in East Asia in terms of the models used at the time of their establishment, there is no uniform pattern of think-tank development in the region that can be traced back to the operations of developmental states. This Special Issue explores the driving forces of and the challenges to think-thank development in three specific East Asian settings: Mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. In particular, the experience with think-tank development in Mainland China raises the necessity of reconsidering prevailing conceptions that think tanks can only prosper in democracies and when they are independent of the government. Two broad conclusions emerge from this Special Issue. First, the contributions emphasize that context matters for think-tank development and, more specifically, that national think-tank sectors are greatly influenced by the particular political context in which they exist. Second, the contributions show not only that the specific political context factors that impact the trajectories and traits of East Asian think-tank sectors vary between countries, but also that they operate at different interactive levels: (a) at the level of the inter-and transnational context within which think-tank sectors develop; (b) at the level of domestic governmental systems and their openness to external policy advice and other think-tank services; and (c) at the level of individual political leaders interested in engaging with think tanks.

Taiwan's landscape of think tanks, despite having emerged during a time of Leninist one-party governance and state-led economic development not unlike that in Mainland China, is today marked by a substantial agency in conducting both research and advocacy. This sets them apart from their counterparts on the mainland. We ask how this development was shaped by Taiwan's evolution as a political entity, especially its experience of gradual political liberalization and eventual full democratization by the mid-1990s. In its wake, multiparty competition, factionalism, the emergence of a vigorous civil society, and individual interest groups created an environment in which think-tank services were sought by many competing actors, offering a wide array of funding opportunities for policy research. Additionally, a political culture that stresses expertise and the need to conduct unofficial diplomacy often gave think tanks a privileged position within the system, and they served as key agents in conducting the kind of informal diplomacy made necessary by Taiwan's loss of diplomatic recognition from the 1970s onwards. We further offer an overview of Taiwan's think-tank landscape, describing major groups (or types) of institutes and briefly portraying especially prominent cases within them. Finally, we provide two detailed case studies to show how these institutes operate in practice, and how the need for unofficial diplomacy and a recent government change have shaped their activities.

Après la victoire inattendue de Donald Trump lors de l’élection présidentielle de 2016, l’Asie orientale est confrontée à une période d’incertitude quant à la future politique américaine dans la région. Pour la Chine, cela présente un ensemble particulier de défis, compte tenu de la rhétorique passée de Trump, mais aussi des occasions de se rapprocher du modèle qu’elle souhaite pour la relation bilatérale avec les États-Unis. Cet article analyse le discours des experts de la politique étrangère chinoise de la candidature de Trump et le début de la présidence, et s’intéresse à l’évolution de leurs perceptions ainsi qu’à celle de leurs recommandations.

This chapter examines public commentaries from Chinese foreign policy experts on the South China Sea issue and China’s relationships with some of the other dispute parties and extra-regional actors. It aims to establish systematic differences in how two specific actors—Vietnam and the Philippines—are being portrayed, if and how expert assessments differ from the official position, and what policy suggestions are being made. To explore these questions, I combine an in-depth study of a number of commentaries relating to highly publicized events like the standoffs over HS 981 and Scarborough Shoal with a quantitative content and sentiment analysis of a sample of over 1500 pieces written by Chinese experts since 2010. Based on the findings, I argue that despite the Chinese insistence on describing the South China Sea as a regional issue, Chinese experts view it as an area of strategic contention with the United States, and perceptions of local actors are strongly shaped by their alignment with the US. Furthermore, while Chinese experts unanimously stand behind their nation’s territorial claims in the area, they have also emerged as a voice favoring moderation and de-escalation, and thus act as a possible counterweight to elite and grassroots demands for an even more assertive foreign policy. Finally, by tracking the diversity of views apparent in these debates, we can glean some insights into how China debates its future course on this issue, as well as the degree to which related policies have been settled or are still in flux.

Asian Politics & PolicyVolume 8, Issue 2 p. 361-365 MEDIA REVIEW Expert Voices in Chinese Media: The Case of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Dispute Pascal Abb, Pascal Abb German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Institute of Asian Studies, Hamburg, GermanySearch for more papers by this author Pascal Abb, Pascal Abb German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Institute of Asian Studies, Hamburg, GermanySearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 April 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/aspp.12253Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume8, Issue2April 2016Pages 361-365 RelatedInformation

This paper uses the case of Sino–Southeast Asian relations to gain insights on China’s ability to muster support for its global agenda. The analysis focuses on the regional–global nexus of interstate relations and explores the extent to which the quality of two states’ regional relations influences the likelihood of behavioral alignment in global politics. To this end, we consider a range of potentially influential aspects of Sino–Southeast Asian relations (the quality of bilateral relations based on recent event data, alliance policy, regime similarity, development level, and economic ties) and employ a statistical model to search for correlations with observed trends of voting coincidence in the United Nations General Assembly during the period 1979–2010. We find a strong correlation between the quality of regional bilateral relations and global policy alignment, which indicates that patterns of regional cooperation and conflict also impact the trajectory of China’s rise in world affairs.

The role of foreign policy think tanks (FPTTs) in policy-making has received substantial scholarly attention, with most studies focusing on US-based organizations. In this article, we seek to address this spatial bias by discussing the development and roles of FPTTs in two East Asian countries, China and Japan. China today hosts the second-largest think tank scene in the world, and many FPTTs have received influxes of funding and increased the academic qualifications of their staffers in recent years. Japan also hosts a sizable array of think tanks, but many of them operate on a for-profit basis and do not focus on public policy issues; Japan has very few genuine FPTTs. In both countries, FPTTs are in many ways linked to the government. While they seek to inform and influence foreign and security policy as well as public discourse on international affairs, they usually do not act as agenda setters. By examining the recent case of constitutional reinterpretation in Japan, which aimed to enable collective self-defence, we show how Japanese public intellectuals, including think tankers, helped to legitimize this controversial move and how Chinese FPTTs reacted publicly by providing media commentary in support of the official government line.

This article provides an overview of activities by Chinese foreign policy think tanks, with a particular focus on developments over the last decade. Covering a sample of prominent institutes, it provides up-to-date information about their academic, advisory and PR functions, and highlights major differences between individual institutes and organizational groups. In line with the findings, I argue that Chinese think tanks have undergone a remarkable increase and professionalization in their academic work, as well as made big strides in improving their footprint in the media. Finally, the article also considers new developments in networking organizations that have been particularly important in bringing experts together to pursue mutual interests, and how these relate to changes in Beijing's international agenda.