The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) originated in provincial-level efforts that sought to simultaneously integrate interior and frontier provinces to the rest of China as well as neighboring countries during the 1990s.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) originated in provincial-level efforts that sought to simultaneously integrate interior and frontier provinces to the rest of China as well as neighboring countries during the 1990s.
Since the U.S. election Iranian-American relations have gone into a rapid tailspin, with Iran reacting to the triumphalist tenor of the Trump campaign and the improvised response of former National...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Layna Mosley, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She researches...
It won't be too long before we start to get a better understanding of what foreign policy in a Trump Administration will actually look like. It's useful to keep in mind that current rhetoric is no...
If you haven’t yet seen the zone’s geography, here it is to the left, complete with its overlap with the Korean and Japanese zones. The most important conflict of course is over Senkaku, but Korea watchers will also note that the Ieodo submerged reef, which Korea claims, is also in the zone. Gotta wonder what the Chinese were thinking by giving Korea and Japan common cause over anything. Foolish. Dan Drezner asked the question I think pretty much everyone is wondering now: did the PRC really expect the US, Japan, and SK to just accept this out of the blue? Obviously they’re not, and it’s...
As has been widely reported in the Western media, on Friday, China’s state media finally officially announced two changes in human rights policies: (a) an end of the “Laojiao” policy of “re-education through labor” and (b) a change in the one-child policy in China, allowing two children per family if at least one of the parents was a single child (before both parents had to be only children). Other, somewhat underreported, changes coming from the same official media report about the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China included a reduction of...
In the northern city of Harbin, China, air quality was so bad ten days ago that concentrations of particulate matter reportedly reached 1000 micrograms per cubic meter at their peak, exceeding the World Health Organization's daily safe levels by a factor of 40 and shrouding the city in a fog so dense that commuters had trouble finding their way and a numbers of schools were forced to close. As China's pollution has reached intolerable levels, the air quality problem may pose an opportunity for China to address not only its dirty air but also its greenhouse gas emissions, as actions to reduce...
I was just in China for a work thing, when I checked the Duck for something. Turns out the Duck is screened out by the Great Firewall. Even if you go to Google Search Hong Kong, it’s still blocked. Wow. Who knew even nerdy IR theory and pop culture references posed a threat to CCP rule? Lame. Even more lame - my own website, which gets way less traffic, is blocked too. For sites as small as mine, that’s almost a complement – hah. If only I had readers similarly interested enough to even bother…
The following is a re-up of a piece I wrote for the Diplomat last month as part of an informal back-and-forth series with the National Interest this summer on the US pivot to Asia and AirSea Battle. (Here and here are some of the other entries.) That pic, which has got to be the grossest river in all China, is from here. In brief, I increasingly think that ASB is a mistake, because it’s almost impossible to read it as anything other than hugely provocative from the Chinese point of view, no matter what we say to them about our peaceful intentions. (Read this, and tell me reasonable Chinese...
The Chinese state media could perhaps be forgiven for mistaking fictional Battlestar Galactica blueprints for future US fleet schematics this week, given this. This incident has me thinking about Nexon/Neumann's argument regarding the fuzzy relationship between science fiction and ""reality."" (Yes, you did just read scare quotes in scare quotes.) In their Harry Potter and International Relations introduction, they point out that the "reality" we distinguish from "fiction" is itself expressed and accessed through representations that themselves include elements of fiction and narrative....
In the old old question of why the weak occasionally beat the strong, my favourite metaphor is the Ham Omelette. In a Ham Omelette, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. In a clash over the Taiwan Strait, who would be the pig, who the chicken? This matters, because in the end predicting the outcome of a China-Taiwan clash would not be about the absolutes of military victory narrowly conceived, but about the issue of cost tolerance and the fear of a Pyrrhic result. Relations between Taiwan and Beijing have eased in the latest 'detente.' But some worry that their mutual aims...
In case you don't know, the PRC has censored searches for "Big Yellow Duck." The reason? You can see a larger version here.The arrival of Florentijn Hofman's yellow duck in Hong Kong harbor sparked a great deal of excitement in China, where the duck has become incredibly popular. A number of stories document a proliferation of knock-off ducks throughout the country, including one large in Shanghai and numerous smaller imitations. So it isn't that surprising that a microblogger would appropriate Hofman's duck for memorializing the 1989 failed democratic uprising. Via just about...