A bipartisan consensus in the U.S. House of Representatives culminated in the passage of legislation in that, if also passed by the Senate and signed into law by the president, would require the Beijing-based company, ByteDance, to either divest from its U.S.-based subsidiary – TikTok – or have it be removed from the U.S. market … Read more
Earlier this week, U.S. President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held their first phone call since the two leaders met face-to-face in San Francisco last November. In the Chinese readout of the call, Xi reportedly stated that “China-U.S. relations are stabilizing.” Both sides have accepted the premise that bilateral competition requires diplomatic communication. Nonetheless, … Read more
In late March, the Biden administration released revised rules that will further tighten China’s access to U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) chips and chip-making tools. The U.S. imposed a series of export control measures first in October 2022 with the goal of restricting China’s access to advanced AI chips made with U.S. inputs. These measures were … Read more
While predicting China’s trajectory has always been fraught with danger, there are a few trend lines that provide some guidance. These trend lines stem from what the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Neil Thomas has astutely framed as Xi Jinping’s three “balancing acts”: balancing economic growth with security, balancing diplomatic “struggle” against the United States with … Read more
The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Richard Fontaine – CEO of the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. and co-author, with Robert Blackwill, of “Lost Decade: The U.S. Pivot to … Read more
In a meeting of the U.S. National Security Council held on June 8, 1960, John F. Dulles, the secretary of state of the Eisenhower administration, made an interesting comment on Cold War Hong Kong: “Hong Kong exists because it is useful both to the Free World and the Sino-Soviet Bloc.” Sixty years later, Dulles’ comment … Read more
The United States “faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications,” the U.S. intelligence community’s 2024 Annual Threat Assessment states. The assessment, an unclassified summary of which has been published annually since 2006 (with the glaring … Read more
Not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars like Aaron Friedberg, John Mearsheimer, and Richard Betts began voicing concerns about a new era of great power competition with China. But well into the first decade of the 21st century, many saw such fears as relics of a bygone era of international politics – … Read more
Yesterday, a day after the close of the special Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia delivered a speech at the Australian National University in Canberra. The Malaysian leader’s speech ranged over a number of issues, from Western hypocrisy and the war in Gaza to the importance of ASEAN … Read more
The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Fe-Ling Wang – professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology, and author of “The China Trilogy”: “The China Order: Centralia, World Empire, and … Read more