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
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called on China on Friday to address manufacturing overcapacity that she said risks causing global economic dislocation, and to create a level playing field for American companies and workers. Starting a five-day visit in one of China’s major industrial and export hubs, she raised what the U.S. considers to be … Read more
Magazine While there are important similarities between the Biden and Trump approaches toward China, there are also stark and meaningful differences. In this Nov. 11, 2020, file photo a Chinese flag hangs near an automated parcel handling line at a warehouse for an online retailer in Beijing. Credit: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File Upon taking office … Read more
China’s nationalist leader, Xi Jinping, called for closer trade ties with the United States during a meeting on Wednesday with top American business leaders. The gathering in Beijing came amid a steady improvement in relations that had sunk to the lowest level in years. Xi emphasized the mutually beneficial economic ties between the world’s two … Read more
When I studied history at university, a lecturer instructed us to read the diaries and memoirs and newspaper articles written a few weeks before a global disaster. How did the ordinary Frenchman regard the state of the world in June 1914? What was the average Pole thinking in August 1939? Then we were instructed to … 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
Is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan tomorrow’s Ukraine war? The parallels between the two cases, where a revisionist power stands poised to pounce on a vulnerable neighbor, make it a scenario that is now feared by many. Sometimes, an invasion of Taiwan by China is even treated almost as a foregone conclusion, a question of … Read more
“Power over opinion is therefore not less essential for political purposes than military and economic power,” the prominent British political scientist and historian E.H. Carr wrote of the period of rising conflict during the two world wars. Yet a century or so later, as China-U.S. competition intensifies in Southeast Asia, there continues to be relatively … Read more