Political Geography: China - CIAO Search Results

351. Security Threats and the Strategic Rediscovery of Japan: Public Opinion on Korea–Japan Bilateral Cooperation - Evidence from the First Korea–U.S.–Japan Public Opinion Poll

Author:: Sangmi Jeong
Publication Date:: 09-2025
Content Type:: Policy Brief
Institution:: East Asia Institute (EAI)
Abstract:: Professor Sangmi Jeong of the Center for Geo-Political Studies at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy presents findings from the first Korea-U.S.-Japan Public Opinion Poll, indicating that South Koreans tend to view security cooperation with Japan more positively as their threat perception towards North Korea and China increases. The author argues that this threat perception vis-à-vis North Korea and China leads not only to support for trilateral security cooperation but also for bilateral cooperation between South Korea and Japan, demonstrating that Koreans view Japan as a strategic partner for responding to security threats. Professor Jeong suggests it is necessary to observe whether future self-centered actions by the U.S. could become a factor driving the perceived necessity for cooperation with Japan among Koreans.
Topic:: Security, Defense Policy, Bilateral Relations, Public Opinion, and Polls
Political Geography:: Japan, China, Asia, South Korea, and North Korea

352. Enhancing the Quad’s Cybersecurity Cooperation to Counter Chinese Cyberattacks

Author:: Kristina Lozinskaya
Publication Date:: 12-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: In recent months, Washington’s actions and rhetoric have raised doubts about the strength of its commitment to allies, including those within the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad), consisting of the United States, Japan, India, and Australia. The uncertainty surrounding the future of cooperation among the Quad countries coincides with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran—the so-called “axis of upheaval”—projecting unprecedented unity at China’s largest-ever military parade in September. The photos of these leaders together in Beijing should remind U.S. leadership to invest in good relations with the Quad. The framework provides an undeniable value-add to U.S. foreign policy as a group united by the shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific and the threats that could potentially undermine it. One such threat is China’s pervasive cyber interference. As global powers are preoccupied by rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), the conversation about Chinese cyberattacks has faded into the background. The threat, however, has not diminished, as CrowdStrike reported a staggering 150% increase in China-nexus cyber intrusions and espionage operations globally in 2024. For years, Beijing has been trying to covertly gain access to the networks operating critical infrastructure worldwide, building up the capacity to disrupt vital systems during a crisis. China is winning the cyber war in the absence of any tangible response to it. Visibly enhancing the Quad’s cybersecurity cooperation has the potential to send a strong message to Beijing and bolster deterrence, while also improving allied capabilities and cyber defense. To develop concrete recommendations to enhance the Quad’s cybersecurity, the author of this paper reached out to experts in the field and is very grateful to have solicited insights from Sameer Patil, former Assistant Director at the National Security Council Secretariat in India’s Prime Minister’s Office; Ken Jimbo, former Special Advisor to Japan’s Minister of Defense; Samantha Payne, former Policy Advisor on the Technology and National Security team at the National Security Council; Nishank Motwani, Senior Analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute; Motohiro Tsuchiya, an expert member of the Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters of the Japanese government; Dai Mochinaga, Associate Professor at the Department of Systems Engineering and Science at Shibaura Institute of Technology; and Arindrajit Basu, a Non-Resident Fellow and PhD Candidate at Leiden University’s Faculty of Global Governance and Affairs. This paper’s recommendations to enhance the Quad’s cybersecurity cooperation focus on prioritizing function rather than form in striving to achieve results that are “tangible” rather than “on paper;” improving joint attribution; fostering the harmonization of regulations; providing a platform for cooperation of counterpart institutions; exchanging expertise and best practices; leveraging existing frameworks to strengthen public-private partnerships; and establishing a joint emergency response team to bolster regional cybersecurity.
Topic:: International Cooperation, Cybersecurity, Regulation, Institutions, and Quad Alliance
Political Geography:: China and Global Focus

353. "We Must Depend Entirely on Ourselves": Policy, Politics, and U.S.–China Relations at the Fourth Plenum

Author:: Neil Thomas
Publication Date:: 11-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: What kind of deal does Xi Jinping want with Donald Trump? Twelve hours after the two leaders met in Busan last Thursday, I sat in a New York ballroom packed with hundreds of executives, policymakers, and foreign-affairs experts. When a speaker asked who believed China and the United States would reach a “comprehensive trade deal” by the end of Trump’s term, half the room raised their hands. I was surprised. Beijing is not chasing a grand bargain; it is seeking a truce to buy time and build leverage. Xi’s diplomatic messaging contrasts with his domestic rhetoric. In South Korea, he told Trump that “China’s development should go hand in hand with your vision to Make America Great Again,” and that “our two countries can totally help each other to succeed and prosper.” In Beijing, at the Fourth Plenum of the Communist Party’s 20th Central Committee, which ran from October 20–23, he called for “upholding the multilateral trading system” but also said China must “win the strategic initiative amid fierce international competition.” The plenum confirmed Beijing’s continued focus on strengthening self-reliance. It issued authoritative “Proposals” (jianyi 建议) for China’s next five-year plan, which will be drafted by the State Council and released by the National People’s Congress at the Two Sessions next March. As anticipated by the Center for China Analysis (CCA), Xi’s top priorities remain “building a modernized industrial system” and “self-reliance and self-strengthening in science and technology.” Xi’s bargaining position is strong: the Party reaffirmed its call to “unite more closely around the Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core.” Yet politics intruded on the polished optics in an unusually obvious way. State-media cameras could not hide rows of empty seats in the meeting hall — belonging to scores of officials absent because they were dead, disgraced, or under investigation. The image captured a paradox of Xi’s power: complete control, but constant purges. This article shows how the Fourth Plenum advanced Xi’s drive to build technological self-reliance, tighten political control, and centralize decision-making ahead of the 21st Party Congress in late 2027. The contrast between his conciliatory tone in Busan and his assertive message in Beijing signals confidence, not weakness, and underscores that his economic agenda remains defined by strategic competition with the United States. For Washington, this means hardened industrial rivalry rather than market opening: U.S. firms should expect more state direction, tougher conditions for trade and investment, and continued expansion of China’s export-control regime. Both sides now prize self-reliance over interdependence — but Xi is betting that his strategic resolve will outlast Trump’s.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Industrial Policy, Bilateral Relations, Governance, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
Political Geography:: China, Asia, North America, and United States of America

354. China’s Next Move: Economic Priorities and Policy Shifts for 2026

Author:: Lizzi C. Lee and Jing Qian
Publication Date:: 12-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: China approaches the 2025 Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC) at a pivotal moment. The economy expanded by 5.3% in the first half of the year on the back of exports, fiscal stimulus, and consumption boosts, but underlying weaknesses became more pronounced as stimulus faded and structural pressures intensified by the third quarter. As the operational bridge between the 14th and 15th Five-Year Plans — and a waypoint toward China’s 2035 development goals — this year’s CEWC must link near-term macro stabilization with medium-term structural priorities. Fiscal policy will remain Beijing’s primary lever for near term stabilization, with spending increasingly directed toward healthcare, childcare, education, and eldercare — public-service sectors central to raising productivity and unlocking durable consumption. Boosting domestic demand will require not only fiscal support but also improved service-sector capacity, higher labor mobility, and more accessible public goods. Without these, consumption cannot become a reliable engine of growth. Support for the property market is expected to remain targeted and restrained, reflecting limited appetite to revive a property–driven growth model constrained by demographics and excess supply. Policy signals may emphasize fostering more orderly competition — reducing local protectionism, curbing “involution,” strengthening fair-competition enforcement, and discouraging subsidy-driven or zero-sum expansion. Industrial Policy 2.0 is emerging, focused on modernizing traditional industries while accelerating strategic sectors such as renewables, aerospace, advanced batteries, new materials, low-altitude economy, AI, and biomanufacturing. A central challenge is the private sector’s still-weak confidence. High liquidity has not translated into investment or hiring because constraints now lie in profitability, expectations, and policy predictability rather than capital availability. Without renewed private-sector participation, neither consumption nor innovation nor industrial upgrading can gain sustained traction. Execution risk remains significant. Translating CEWC priorities into outcomes requires alignment between central intent and local implementation, overcoming fiscal strains, uneven administrative capacity, and misaligned incentives at the subnational level — especially amid a more unsettled geopolitical environment. An appendix accompanies this report, providing a concise overview of what the CEWC is, how its official readout is produced, and how to interpret the subsequent documents and policy signals that follow.
Topic:: Economics, Industrial Policy, Fiscal Policy, and Economic Competition
Political Geography:: China and Asia

355. Healthy China 2030 & APEC Opportunities: “Health-First” Domestic Reform, Biotech Innovation, and International Cooperation

Author:: Lizzi C. Lee, Chen Liu, and Jing Qian
Publication Date:: 10-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: “Health” has moved to the center of China’s governance agenda and, increasingly, to the core of Asia-Pacific regional cooperation. This paper argues that Healthy China 2030 is more than a public health initiative. It is a flagship political project designed to address the twin pressures of demographic aging and chronic disease while positioning China as an emerging, resilient global leader in innovative development. In alignment with China’s other long-term blueprints, including the Five-Year Plans and the Made in China 2025 industrial strategy, Healthy China 2030 promotes the state’s capacity for resilience and sustainable economic development. Domestically, China’s health reforms remain hampered by weak primary care, bureaucratic fragmentation, and misaligned incentives, placing its demographic transition under ever-increasing pressure. This is a global challenge faced by other Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies and most countries across the world. In China, the urgency is even greater. To address these significant challenges, Beijing is simultaneously pushing at the frontiers of biotech innovation, regulatory reform, the return of scientific talent, and advances in artificial intelligence (AI). These initiatives have transformed China into a credible and leading force in novel therapies, generating cost-effective products with huge potential benefits for the international community, society, and global health markets. However, this progress is still somewhat limited by the risks of fragile financing, rigid institutions, and geopolitical uncertainty. Against this dynamic backdrop, APEC emerges as a central bridge: a pragmatic, consensus-driven platform through which health cooperation can advance even amid unstable geopolitical rivalries. Shared global pressures of demographic burdens, escalating healthcare costs, and risks of potential pandemic disease create strong incentives for collective action. APEC has the capacity to transform fragmented national experiments into shared resilience through joint regulatory reviews, integrated regional data-sharing frameworks, and financing mechanisms for biotech and other initiatives. Such alignment also offers China the chance to project constructive leadership in the run-up to its chairing of APEC 2026. By demonstrating how domestic reforms and biotech advances can translate into regional public goods, China can showcase to the world the tangible results of Healthy China 2030 as contributions to Asia-Pacific prosperity rather than as instruments of competition — whether those come from digital health platforms, chronic disease management models, or cost-effective biomedical innovations. The wider region stands to benefit from a framework that both strengthens collective health security and accelerates regulatory and technological convergence. By pooling data, expertise, and financing through APEC mechanisms, member economies can scale best practices in preventive care, aging policy, and biotechnology, reducing duplication and closing capacity gaps between developed and developing economies. In turn, this can foster a more resilient and inclusive regional health ecosystem — one that aligns economic integration with human well-being. For the world, it opens a rare domain of intersection, where U.S.-China collaboration and U.S.-China–led multilateral cooperation can advance with fewer political frictions and yield substantial shared gains in economics, science, and public health. A cooperative APEC agenda on health innovation and governance provides a model for tackling transnational challenges as a whole: even amid strategic competition, joint stewardship of human welfare remains not only possible but also mutually beneficial.
Topic:: International Cooperation, Reform, Innovation, and Biotechnology
Political Geography:: China and Asia

356. Indonesia’s Energy Transition: Exercising Strategic Agency in Partnership with China

Author:: Kevin Zongzhe Li
Publication Date:: 08-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: In an era of global fragmentation and weakened multilateralism, Indonesia stands at the intersection of climate urgency, development ambition, and geopolitical complexity. As Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth-most populous country, Indonesia must navigate the defining challenge of our time: how to decarbonize at speed and scale without derailing economic growth, industrial upgrading, and national policy autonomy. China has emerged as a pivotal partner of Indonesia across the clean energy value chain, from nickel processing and electric vehicles to solar deployment and industrial parks, via a mixture of strategic policy design and economic gravity. Yet this engagement remains pragmatic, driven by commercial logic and resource complementarities, rather than long-term development alignment. Without deliberate structuring, Indonesia risks trading fossil fuel dependence for new forms of clean energy reliance. Through industrial policy, downstream mandates, and targeted investment rules, Indonesia is exercising strategic agency: leveraging its market size and resource base to shape engagement on its terms. Indonesia’s evolving approach offers a reference point for other middle-power countries navigating how to engage major powers, localize value, and align external investment with domestic priorities. This paper examines Indonesia’s evolving energy transition strategy through the lens of its deepening, but increasingly complex, relationship with China. Based on a literature review and stakeholder interviews, it offers a structured assessment of China–Indonesia cooperation across seven critical domains: electric vehicles, critical minerals, renewable energy, green finance, carbon markets, grid infrastructure, and coal transition. It deploys two diagnostic frameworks — the Strategic Partnership Priority Matrix and the Comparative Domain Partnership Assessment — to evaluate alignment and realized outcomes. A set of five guiding principles, centered on (1) enhanced reciprocity, (2) development-compatible decarbonization, (3) local value creation, (4) competitive and aligned finance, and (5) transparency and integrity, provides a normative foundation for structured and reciprocal cooperation. This paper calls for a China-Indonesia Task Force on Just Energy Transition and Industrial Cooperation to align Chinese investment with Indonesia’s labor and industrial upgrading goals while institutionalizing knowledge transfer among key ministries, private sector conveners, state-owned enterprises, and local officials. Ultimately, the future of Sino-Indonesian energy cooperation lies in structured, reciprocal, and domain-specific partnerships that recognize the full value of development-compatible decarbonization. As geopolitical fault lines deepen and the global climate agenda fragments, Indonesia’s evolving strategy offers a blueprint for how middle powers can assert agency, attract capital, and drive transitions on their own terms — balancing urgency with ownership and ambition with accountability.
Topic:: Bilateral Relations, Partnerships, Economic Development, Decarbonization, and Energy Transition
Political Geography:: China, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia

357. Self-Strengthening for Strategic Competition: What to Watch at China’s Fourth Plenum

Author:: Neil Thomas, Lobsang Tsering, Shengyu Wang, and Jing Qian
Publication Date:: 10-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: Chinese policymaking does not run on election cycles; it runs on planning cycles. Since 1953, inspired by the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party has issued fourteen Five-Year Plans (FYPs) to guide economic development. From October 20-23, the 20th Central Committee will meet in Beijing at the military-run Jingxi Hotel for its Fourth Plenum, where it will issue authoritative “Proposals” (jianyi 建议) for the 15th FYP, covering 2026-2030. Plenums are meetings of the roughly 370 members of the Central Committee, which typically gathers seven times during each five-year term. The most well-known remains the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in 1978, remembered as the launch of “Reform and Opening.” But this history has led many observers to fixate excessively on third plenums for economic reforms in China. Under Xi Jinping — who became General Secretary in 2012 — the Fifth Plenum in 2015, which adopted guidance for the 13th FYP (2016-2020), and the Fifth Plenum in 2020, which prepared for the 14th FYP (2021-2025), proved more consequential for economic policy than either of his first two third plenums. Next week’s meeting will be a Fourth Plenum because Xi delayed the last Third Plenum until July 2024, roughly a year later than expected. Xi is a strong believer in planning. He calls it “a major political advantage of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and Beijing celebrates the plans he devised as a local leader in Fujian and Zhejiang. He has backed a forthcoming National Development Planning Law and expanded the planning system to include “three levels” (national, provincial, county), and “four types” (development, sectoral, regional, spatial). A FYP is a national development plan that sets the goals, targets, and priorities of economic and social policy for the next half-decade. The Fourth Plenum’s Proposals will be sent to the State Council to guide drafting of the full plan, which Beijing will publish once approved by the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Two Sessions in March 2026. The upcoming Fourth Plenum will serve as a signpost in China’s development. This piece argues that: 1) Xi’s earlier FYP-focused plenums marked key inflection points in his economic policymaking; 2) this plenum will prioritize techno-industrial self-reliance while advancing gradual structural reforms; and 3) attendance patterns will test the veracity of recent purge rumors.
Topic:: Domestic Politics, Economic Development, Strategic Competition, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
Political Geography:: China and Asia

358. The 19 Percent Revisited: How Youth Unemployment Has Changed Chinese Society

Author:: Barclay Bram
Publication Date:: 09-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: You have to feel for whoever runs the social media accounts of the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC). In early April 2025, they proudly posted about the overwhelming response to a recent job posting: “We received 1,196,273 resumes! They came from 10 cities and 14 top universities across China. Together with over 100 affiliated organizations, we are hiring for 1,730 key roles.”1 What seemed like a cause for celebration was anything but to young people online. CNNC is one of China’s largest state-owned enterprises and, crucially, a stable employer. Here was a stark reminder of how stacked the odds are against the average young Chinese job seeker. With 1.2 million applications for just shy of 8,000 positions (including the “1,730 key roles”), the odds were roughly 150 to 1. To put this into perspective, the odds of getting into Harvard University as an undergraduate are 25 to 1.2 China’s urban youth unemployment rate for ages 16 to 24 has hovered around 20% since the pandemic. When it reached a record 21.3% in mid-2023, the National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing it. When reporting resumed a few months later, figures were calculated using a new methodology that corrected downward. But even with the new system, youth unemployment stood at 16.9% in February 2025, when CNNC’s recruiting drive was underway.3 Many believe the true figure to be much higher. This year has seen China’s largest graduating class in history: 12.22 million, an increase of 430,000 from 2024.4 After weathering the pandemic, this class will enter a job market affected by a brutal trade war with the United States and disrupted by artificial intelligence in almost every sector. Understandably, CNNC’s post did not land well. “You’re telling me I’m a failure, along with a million others,” wrote one Douyin user.5
Topic:: Youth, Unemployment, Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Social Contract, and Gig Economy
Political Geography:: China and Asia

359. Fuerdai: China’s Second Generation of Wealth and Power

Author:: John Osburg
Publication Date:: 10-2025
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: The children of the wealthy and powerful are the target of growing popular resentment in China. Known as the “second-generation rich” (fuerdai) or “second-generation government officials” (guanerdai), they have become symbols of unfairness and corruption in Chinese society. As China’s economic growth has stagnated, competition for desirable jobs has intensified and social mobility appears to be declining. These factors have increased enmity toward the fuerdai, who often benefit from their parents’ connections or can live off inherited wealth. Many fuerdai have studied or lived abroad, but the impact of these experiences has been mixed, and the long-term effect on their values is difficult to assess. Many fuerdai feel that having spent time abroad makes them ill-equipped to navigate China’s complex political, social, and business environment. Because China has no inheritance tax and fuerdai typically marry members of their own social class, they will increasingly become a distinctive stratum of Chinese society, exacerbating already pronounced economic inequality. As they take over their parents’ companies and assume leadership positions in business and politics, they will have a powerful role in shaping China’s future.
Topic:: Inequality, Economic Growth, Youth, Elites, and Social Mobility
Political Geography:: China and Asia

360. Unconventional deterrence in Australian strategy

Author:: Gary Burtless, David Kilcullen, Ian Langford, and Andrew Maher
Publication Date:: 10-2025
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:: As Australia prepares its 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS), the nation must recognise that a window of strategic risk exists now and will do so into the early 2030s. The medium-term acquisition of nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines under AUKUS, intended to deter conflict, is irrelevant to the short-term problem of maintaining deterrence through the coming five-year period of heightened risk (2027–2032). That’s because the first AUKUS submarines—US Virginia-class boats—won’t be delivered until 2032, while the purpose-built SSN-AUKUS won’t arrive until the early 2040s. We can’t, in effect, solve a 2027 deterrence problem with a 2032 deterrent capability. Australia’s traditional reliance upon ‘great and powerful friends’ and extended nuclear deterrence now seems no longer assured. There’s no equivalent to NATO’s Article V for Indo-Pacific security; even if there were, adversaries’ demonstration of ‘grey zone’ capabilities—aiming to weaken alliances, isolate targets, erode resolve and impose costs—suggests that formal alliance commitments may be insufficient. Conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East are demonstrating that smaller players—both middle powers and non-state actors—can generate strategic asymmetry against major powers, in turn deterring them from initiating conflict or escalating in conflict. As recently identified in the UK’s Strategic Defence Review (2025), Ukraine is pioneering a new way of war; British decision-makers have recognised the need to rapidly adapt and are using special operations capability to drive that adaptation. This paper explores asymmetric methods of deterrence and asks whether they might be appropriate for Australia. We organise those methods under the term unconventional deterrence to differentiate them from traditional concepts of conventional and nuclear deterrence, which broadly conform to deterrence-by-punishment or deterrence-by-denial logic. Today’s technologies, however—along with the emergent realities of information and influence operations in a post-industrial information age—offer new asymmetries, new ways to create and apply both military and non-military elements of national power, and thus new mechanisms to deter beyond-peer adversaries from armed aggression. This paper explores those options, offering the concept of unconventional deterrence as an organising principle for special operations, cyber and other specialised capabilities that might be rapidly fielded by Defence and other agencies, and could best be orchestrated through an empowered National Security Adviser reporting directly to the National Security Committee of Cabinet. It also offers a comparative analysis, demonstrating that like-minded middle powers have embraced unconventional deterrence concepts in their military strategies, and are using them to face down their own beyond-peer threats. Australia has options to fill today’s deterrence gap: we just need to look beyond conventional paradigms.
Topic:: Defense Policy, NATO, National Security, Armed Forces, Deterrence, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
Political Geography:: China, Europe, Australia, Asia-Pacific, and United States of America

361. The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights

Author:: Fergus Ryan, Bethany Allen, Shelly Shih, Nathan Attrill, Stephan Robin, Jared Alpert, Astrid Young, and Tilla Hoja
Publication Date:: 12-2025
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:: This report shows how the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming China’s state control system into a precision instrument for managing its population and targeting groups at home and abroad. China’s extensive AI‑powered visual surveillance systems are already well documented. This report reveals new ways that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems to automate censorship, enhance surveillance and pre‑emptively suppress dissent. Drawing on LLM testing, detailed case studies and analyses of procurement documents, corporate filings and job postings, this data‑rich report traces how AI censorship mechanisms distort information and how predictive policing and biometric surveillance reinforce algorithmic repression. ASPI’s research shows that the CCP has created market‑based mechanisms to encourage private innovation in AI‑enabled censorship technology, making it easier and cheaper for companies to comply with censorship mandates. This report also reveals how AI‑powered technology is widening the power differential between China’s state‑supported companies operating abroad and foreign populations—further enabling some Chinese companies to systematically violate the economic rights of vulnerable groups outside China, despite Beijing’s claims that China respects the development rights and sovereignty of other countries. The risks to other countries are clear. China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI‑powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI‑driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence‑based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to counter the rise of AI‑enabled repression and human rights violations, and China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders. The report focuses on four areas where the CCP has expanded its use of advanced AI systems most rapidly between 2023 and 2025: multimodal censorship of politically sensitive images; AI’s integration into the criminal‑justice pipeline; the industrialisation of online information control; and the use of AI‑enabled platforms by Chinese companies operating abroad. Examined together, those cases show how new AI capabilities are being embedded across domains that strengthen the CCP’s ability to shape information, behaviour and economic outcomes at home and overseas. Because China’s AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly and unevenly across sectors, we have focused on domains where significant changes took place between 2023 and 2025, where new evidence became available, or where human‑rights risks accelerated. Those areas do not represent the full range of AI applications in China but are the most revealing of how the CCP is integrating AI technologies into its political‑control apparatus.
Topic:: Human Rights, United Nations, European Union, Artificial Intelligence, and Research and Development
Political Geography:: China, Europe, and Asia

362. Japan-Australia defence cooperation in the Pacific: the case for a partial division of labour

Author:: Alex Bristow
Publication Date:: 12-2025
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:: This report argues that Australia and Japan should develop a partial division of labour in the Pacific to protect the critical sea lines of communication (SLOC) connecting the two countries. This is necessary to reinforce deterrence now and prepare for a possible war instigated by China. In such a conflict, the United States would likely be focused on fighting China and expect allies to shoulder most of the burden of protecting their own supply chains. The report divides the Pacific into four zones and highlights which areas matter most for each partner’s strategic interests. Geography dictates that Japan must pay more attention to countering China in Micronesia, where it works closely with the US, while Australia should play a more prominent role working with New Zealand in Polynesia. Japanese and Australian interests overlap most substantially in Melanesia, especially Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands, with both of those nations bracketing or running parallel to the key SLOC between the east coast of Australia and Japan, forming a chokepoint. Key recommendations in the report include: Australia and Japan should engage the US in joint contingency planning for a wartime division of labour, with the Trilateral Defence Ministerial Meeting serving as the primary coordination mechanism. As a secondary priority, consultations should extend to South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan. Australian and Japanese ministers and officials should look for opportunities to raise conflict-preparedness issues privately with Pacific governments. While each country will often engage Pacific partners separately, their messaging should be coordinated. To manage some of the risks and sensitivities of such discussions, think tanks and research institutions could also play a helpful role, including through the expansion of Track 1.5 mechanisms that engage Japan, Australia and the wider Pacific. Australia should help Japan deepen its engagement with existing mechanisms for regional security cooperation, such as the Joint Heads of Pacific Security Meeting and the South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting, while being mindful not to establish pathways into these forums that China could attempt to follow. Australia could help lay the groundwork for Japan to establish a defence attaché in Port Moresby. While the decision rests solely with PNG and Japan, Australia’s close defence ties with both countries mean it would form part of the discussion.
Topic:: National Security, Armed Forces, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Regional Politics, and Defense Cooperation
Political Geography:: Japan, China, Australia, Asia-Pacific, and Papua New Guinea

363. The People’s Liberation Army: modernised but still mistrusted

Author:: Rowan Callick
Publication Date:: 10-2025
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
Abstract:: Modernisation is at the core of the mission of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to change the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and beyond—to ‘set off a wave of modernisation in the Global South,’ as China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping has urged. This is all about party control. This naturally incorporates the party’s military arm: the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Xi has stressed that it means accelerating the PLA’s development into ‘a world-class army’ capable of seizing and holding down Taiwan, which in recent decades the party has insisted is an integral part of the PRC, even though the PRC has never ruled it. But while Xi has provided the PLA with cutting-edge weaponry, many signs point to his lack of confidence in the process so far of modernising its top personnel—of moulding them into fully responsive cogs in the great CCP machine. That modernising mission matters intensely for the rest of the world—especially for the Indo-Pacific region—because the CCP won’t be satisfied with eating China itself. It’s also working to ensure that far beyond China—and beyond Taiwan, too—global institutions and trends, and regional seas and islands, are made safe for itself. Many governments in the region appear to believe that, despite the PRC’s grey-zone fishing fleets and cyber destabilisation, their nations can continue to enjoy a net-beneficial relationship with the PRC thanks to access to its markets and to its cheap products as long as they don’t compete unfairly. That view, which is common among Indo-Pacific elites, holds that greater engagement with China will provide insurance against its military ambitions. But China’s global security, development, civilisation and governance initiatives and many other programs and relentless rhetoric reveal that Beijing won’t be satisfied with mere engagement. For the party wishes to advance—through PRC-style modernisation—everywhere. Its capacity to pursue key goals militarily is crucial for the credibility of that pervasive mission. That means acquiring world-class weaponry, and ‘military–civil fusion’—the enmeshing of military and civilian industries via extensive technology exchanges—which are helping to transform the PLA from a territorial force into a major maritime power. For Australia, the resulting concerns are manifold—including how to deter the CCP from its ambitions for regional domination, and how to upgrade Canberra’s contingency planning. Xi has reached down to micromanage the military so that it can extend China’s suzerainty over adjacent seas, push US forces further away, and by 2027 be ready to take Taiwan. The changes are intended to provide Xi and his party with greater functional control over the PLA at large. He has reduced the former seven military regions to five theatre commands, to integrate service operations within them. There’s now greater strategic coherence. Xi’s functional goals for PLA modernisation by mid-century are: informationisation, intelligentisation, and the ability to win high-intensity wars through integrated operations and network-centric warfare across all services and domains. The modernisation process also seeks to deter the US and its allies and other partners from blocking CCP ambitions. But, while proclaiming that the PLA ‘has always been a heroic army that the party and the people can fully trust’, Xi demonstrates constantly that it still lacks his personal trust, doubting the loyalty, competence and honesty of senior officers, even those he has appointed. He subjects it to constant organisational and personnel churn. Top-down governance systems often create such dilemmas, even as they struggle to resolve them. This essay examines how modernisation has become the central project for China, and how military structures are being reshaped as a result. It then more briefly describes the impact on hardware, before considering the successes and challenges resulting from this modernisation model. Questions relating to capability gains and strategic intentions are subordinate to the issues arising from the core modernisation narrative.
Topic:: National Security, Armed Forces, Emerging Technology, and People's Liberation Army (PLA)
Political Geography:: China, Australia, and Asia-Pacific

364. Nuclear Deterrence Explained: Strategic Implications for Europe in the Absence of U.S. Extended Deterrence

Author:: Iakob Dadvani
Publication Date:: 05-2025
Content Type:: Commentary and Analysis
Institution:: Georgian Foundation for Strategic International Studies -GFSIS
Abstract:: Recent developments in U.S. foreign policy discourse indicate two potential future directions: prioritization or retrenchment.1 Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric clearly reflects a tendency toward retrenchment, particularly with respect to Europe. The most prominent indicators of this shift include the potential U.S. withdrawal from NATO European command, or a significant downsizing of its role2 , which would reduce the alliance’s overall combat effectiveness. This change would necessitate increased defense spending from European countries to maintain credible conventional deterrence, as the aggregate military power must remain constant despite reduced American involvement. Further to this are the moves to solve the Russia-Ukraine war by pressuring Ukrainians into negotiations that result in an unjust peace without security guarantees.3 Such an outcome would likely lead to long-term instability across the European continent.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, NATO, Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, Donald Trump, Regional Security, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:: Russia, China, Europe, Ukraine, and United States of America

365. The Geopolitics of Batteries How Europe Can Reclaim Energy Storage Sovereignty Before It’s Too Late

Author:: Michael Laha, Valentin Weber, Maria Pericàs Riera, and Aya Adachi
Publication Date:: 12-2025
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP)
Abstract:: China recently announced sweeping export controls that cover large parts of the battery value chain. Coming amid a turbulent period for Europe’s battery sector, these measures are the latest in a string of geopolitical shocks that underscore Europe’s fragile energy storage sovereignty. Against this background, this collection of DGAP Memos provides a one-stop shop for the geopolitics of batteries and what Europe can do to reclaim sovereignty in this critical area.
Topic:: Energy Policy, Sovereignty, Geopolitics, Exports, Value Chains, and Batteries
Political Geography:: China and Europe

366. Global English From terra nullius to lingua nullius – and Global Chinese?

Publication Date:: 09-2025
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:: Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:: This article explores the geopolitics of language policies and their impact on minorities. It analyzes the global expansion of the English language promoted by the United States and United Kingdom, as well as the impact of linguistic imperialism on other languages. The English language’s dominance and influ- ence on the world stage is unique. Its expansion saw a transition from terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”) mythology to equivalent cultura nullius and lingua nullius functions. Attachment to land, cultural heritage, and language is interconnected and existential for minoritized peoples. Efforts to strengthen minoritized languages can draw on universal and national language rights law and linguistic human rights principles. Arguably, the current promotion of Mandarin Chinese will see a new “world” language emerge.
Topic:: Human Rights, Geopolitics, and Language
Political Geography:: China, United Kingdom, and United States of America

367. Power in the International Monetary and Financial System: The Geopolitical Limits of the Exorbitant Privilege

Author:: Luiza Pecis Valenti, Luiza Peruffo, and André M. Cunha
Publication Date:: 12-2025
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Contexto Internacional
Institution:: Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:: This article examines the asymmetries and power dynamics within the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), emphasizing its structural and geopolitical interconnections. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, followed by United States (USA) sanctions such as the freezing of Russian dollar reserves and the exclusion of banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network, demonstrated the capacity of the USA to mobilize monetary and financial instruments for geopolitical purposes. This takes place amid a relative decline in US influence and the rise of alternative powers, notably China, in terms of economic weight, trade, and security. To date, although China meets virtually all theoretical prerequisites for the expansion of its monetary and financial power, this potential has not (yet) materialized into a concrete challenge to the USA-led IMFS. This context brings traditional notions of power in the IMFS into question, revealing the limitations of analyzing the monetary and financial dimensions in isolation. Drawing on the literature on power, economic power, and asymmetries, particularly concerning the dominant role of the dollar, it is argued that the US overuse of its ‘exorbitant privilege’ in pursuit of geopolitical objectives, particularly via financial sanctions, may ultimately erode its own position.
Topic:: International Trade and Finance, Monetary Policy, Geopolitics, Russia-Ukraine War, and Economic Power
Political Geography:: China, Global Focus, and United States of America

368. Net-Zero and Nonproliferation: Assessing Nuclear Power and Its Alternatives

Author:: Henry D. Sokolski
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Book
Institution:: Nonproliferation Policy Education Center
Abstract:: Six years ago, NPEC ran a mock execution of a law Congress passed in 1978 but that the Executive refused to implement —Title V of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978. Title V called on the State and Energy Departments to conduct country-specific analyses of how developing states might best meet their energy needs without nuclear power. It also called for the creation of an energy Peace Corps and an assessment of what our government was spending on energy development aid-related projects. When NPEC started its efforts, the staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked to see what NPEC produced to use it to pressure the Executive finally to implement the law. NPEC commissioned a number of studies on how Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and Taiwan might best meet their energy requirements without nuclear power. The center also contracted studies on the history and intent of Title V and on what government programs were already in play that aligned with Title V‘s stated objectives. As soon as NPEC’s project was completed, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff prepared a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking the Secretary finally to implement Title V and file the reports required by law. Then, something unexpected occurred. The committee’s legal counsel discovered that the Secretary was under no obligation to comply: Congress had eliminated Title V’s reporting requirements along with several hundred other Congressionally mandated reports back in 1995. Flummoxed, I quietly set the book manuscript aside. Why, then, release it today? Because it is again timely. In October, the Biden Administration announced it is still considering extending civilian nuclear cooperation with Riyadh that would allow the Kingdom to enrich uranium — a process that can bring states within weeks of acquiring the bomb. Administration officials no longer question if Saudi Arabia really needs nuclear energy to meet its energy requirements. Shouldn’t they? Meanwhile, Taiwan’s presidential election this coming Saturday will, among other things, decide if Taiwan will build more nuclear reactors or not. Again, is new nuclear Taiwan’s best energy bet? As for China, the Pentagon has become increasingly concerned that the two “peaceful” fast breeder reactors and plutonium reprocessing plants Beijing is building will be used to make hundreds of bombs worth of weapons plutonium. One of the two fast breeder reactors is already operating. The question these dangerous nuclear activities raise is just how necessary they are to meet China’s energy requirements. Then, there’s Iran, which is intent on building reactors of Iranian design. It plans on expanding its nuclear power program from roughly one gigawatt electrical capacity to 11. Given Iran’s renewables potential and oil and gas reserves, how much sense does this make? Finally, in its efforts to achieve net zero, the Biden Administration has joined 20 other nations in pledging to triple global nuclear generation by 2050. Again, how practical is this? This volume’s aim is to help provide answers. Of course, in light of how long our government has ignored Title V, demanding it be implemented now would be odd. Creating a clean energy Peace Corps, comparing the costs of different types of energy, and trying to determine what investments would reduce emissions quickest and cheapest, however, all should be discussed. It’s my hope that the release of Net-Zero and Nonproliferation: Assessing Nuclear Power and Its Alternatives today might prompt such discussion.
Topic:: International Cooperation, Nuclear Power, Nonproliferation, Legislation, Energy, and Net Zero
Political Geography:: China, Iran, Middle East, Taiwan, Asia, Saudi Arabia, North America, and United States of America

369. German Ports and China: How to Reconcile Openness, Resilience and Security?

Author:: Marie Krpata
Publication Date:: 04-2024
Content Type:: Case Study
Institution:: Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI)
Abstract:: Germany is dependent on its ports for the smooth running of its open economic model and has benefited from globalization in recent decades when the internationalization of its value chains strengthened its competitiveness. Yet, with today’s hardening geopolitics, the vulnerabilities of Europe’s leading economic power are becoming apparent. Germany’s ports are an indispensable interface between its production base and its export markets, as well as for its sources of supply. Crucial to its competitiveness, Germany’s ports are becoming increasingly indispensable for energy supplies given the country’s decoupling from Russian hydrocarbons, and they are essential for the deployment of military equipment to Europe’s eastern flank. This is why particular vigilance is required in ports such as Hamburg, where the Chinese shipping company COSCO has acquired a stake in the company operating the Tollerort terminal. This transaction would scarcely have worried anyone in the past. But now it is the subject of bitter discussions, with the Zeitenwende (“change of era”) announced by Olaf Scholz in reaction to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Increased caution seemed to gain a foothold in order not to repeat past mistakes –until the German Chancellor decided in favor of the acquisition. Given closer ties between China and Russia, China’s assertive stance on the international stage, and increased pressure on Germany from its American ally to clarify its position with regard to its main trading partner, Germany is seeing its room for maneuver shrink. Today, we need a more European approach that goes beyond short-term, profit-driven concerns. But to achieve this, we need to put in place a range of resources to be deployed in a resolutely cooperative approach.
Topic:: Security, International Trade and Finance, Sports, Trade, Industry, and Resilience
Political Geography:: China, Europe, Asia, and Germany

370. Xi Jinping’s Visit to France: Stumbling Blocks Pile Up on the Path of Bilateral Cooperation

Author:: Marc Julienne
Publication Date:: 05-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI)
Abstract:: On May 6 and 7, Chinese President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019 and the Covid-19 pandemic. Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping will celebrate Franco-Chinese friendship and the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between their two countries. It comes at a time when the bilateral relationship is officially perceived as positive on both sides, especially after the French President’s visit to China in April 2023. However, beneath the diplomatic varnish, obstacles are piling up, and the space for cooperation between the two countries is receding. Of the four major areas of cooperation on the visit’s agenda – Ukraine, economic relations, human and cultural exchanges, and global challenges – the first three are already facing significant limitations. Beyond the strictly bilateral relationship, the two heads of state have radically different visions of and for Europe. Finally, there is a number of issues that remain absent from the discussions, which are not likely to ease tensions: the Taiwan Strait, nuclear arms control and Chinese interference in Europe. They will need to be addressed sooner or later.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Bilateral Relations, Emmanuel Macron, and Xi Jinping
Political Geography:: China, Europe, Asia, and France

371. Power and Financial Interdependence

Author:: Brad Setser
Publication Date:: 05-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI)
Abstract:: The link between financial self-reliance and geopolitical power has long been debated. The unbalanced Sino-American trade relationship has created asymmetric financial ties which generate potential sources of leverage for both parties and will not quickly disappear. Absent a clarifying major crisis, it will be difficult to definitively determine which party has greater leverage. Many in the United States (US) are concerned about indebtedness to its primary strategic rival, and the risks posed by a sudden Chinese withdrawal from US financial markets. US policymakers actively sought to encourage China’s top leadership not to withdraw financing from the market for US Agency securities in the run-up to the global financial crisis. Yet China also sees risks in this unbalanced financial relationship. Chinese policymakers have expressed concern about the domestic political consequences of losses on either their Treasury or Agency holdings and actively have sought to diversify China’s reserves – including by substituting the risk of lending to developing economies for the visibility associated with large holdings of Treasuries in US custodians. China increasingly worries that its dollar holdings and the dollar’s global role increase its vulnerability to potential financial sanctions. Both parties thus worry about the possibility that financial interdependence can be weaponized yet find it hard to extricate themselves from the inevitability of financial interdependence absent a clean break from an entrenched pattern of trade imbalances.
Topic:: International Trade and Finance, Bilateral Relations, Finance, and Interdependence
Political Geography:: China, Asia, North America, and United States of America

372. Seeking Safer Shells: An Analysis of Interpretations, Justifications, and Rationales Behind Decisions on North Korean Defectors’ Right to Asylum

Author:: Megumi Faith Mallari and Saleh Naas
Publication Date:: 04-2024
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Journal of Public and International Affairs (JPIA)
Institution:: School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), Princeton University
Abstract:: Despite their known and indisputable need for protection, North Koreans often have their applications for asylum rejected. This paper outlines the differing interpretations of North Koreans’ right to asylum and investigates the rationales and justifications behind them through the case studies of the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and China (PRC). The paper argues that the rationale of the European countries analyzed is based on their generally restrictive view on asylum, independent from their political positioning on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Contrastingly, the rationales of the United States and the PRC are grounded in interests directly related to the Korean peninsula and Cold War narratives.
Topic:: Geopolitics, Asylum, and Refugee Policy
Political Geography:: China, United Kingdom, Asia, South Korea, North Korea, France, Germany, Netherlands, and United States of America

373. Emerging Powers and the Future of American Statecraft

Author:: Christopher S. Chivvis and Beatrix Geaghan-Breiner
Publication Date:: 04-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:: The structure of international politics is changing in ways that are not fully appreciated in Washington. The United States has paid a great deal of attention to the rise of China in the last decade but much less to emerging powers whose rise will also shape the operating environment for American statecraft. No single emerging power will have an impact tantamount to China’s, but they will have a significant impact collectively due to their geopolitical weight and diplomatic aspirations. America has limited ability to influence the trajectory of these emerging powers, identified in this report as Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and Türkiye. They have taken stances that contrast or directly clash with U.S. positions on China and on Russia over the past few years. Nearly all have voiced concerns about Washington’s approach to the war in Ukraine, even as they criticized Moscow’s invasion. Almost none would line up with the United States in a confrontation with China. Instead, they are likely to pursue highly self-interested foreign policies. Washington should expect that they will increasingly challenge some of its policies, sustain relationships with its adversaries, and press their own agendas on the global stage. The emerging powers’ statecrafts are shaped in large part by their drive for economic security. But their geographies, different preferences for world order, domestic politics, and defense relationships also play a role. Concerns about the strength of democracy in other countries, which has played an animating role in U.S. foreign policy for decades, are a lower priority for them, no matter how democratic they are. It will be a mistake for the United States to frame its relations with these emerging powers primarily as part of a competition for influence with China and Russia, however tempting it may be to do so. These powers are not swing states that will tilt decisively toward either side in a global great power competition. Most will resist any efforts to bring them into a U.S.-led camp as in the Cold War. Trying to make them do so would also risk strategic overreach by embroiling the United States too deeply in the emerging powers’ domestic politics or by expending its resources in pursuit of building ties that never materialize. A better approach for the United States would be to focus on negotiating interest-based deals with emerging powers while cordoning off areas of disagreement. These might include tailored market access and investment agreements, agreements on technology manufacturing, energy transition initiatives, efforts to combat deforestation, efforts to build public health infrastructure, and infrastructure investments. It would be wasteful of the United States to offer these countries security guarantees, but in some cases providing security assistance can serve its interests. Washington should accept that most of these countries will maintain close diplomatic, economic, and sometimes security relationships with China and probably Russia. Over the longer term, it will serve U.S. interests to strengthen the sovereignty of emerging powers when possible and cost-effective to do so. This will provide a bulwark against the undue expansion of China’s power and influence and help ensure that, even if they do not side with the United States, they are not drawn closely into the orbit of its major geopolitical competitors. Strengthening emerging powers’ sovereignty will also help boost their development as constructive powers with a stake in sustaining a peaceful world order conducive to global economic growth.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Sovereignty, Strategic Competition, and Emerging Powers
Political Geography:: Africa, Russia, China, Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and United States of America

374. Tracing the Roots of China’s AI Regulations

Author:: Matt Sheehan
Publication Date:: 02-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:: In 2021 and 2022, China became the first country to implement detailed, binding regulations on some of the most common applications of artificial intelligence (AI). These rules formed the foundation of China’s emerging AI governance regime, an evolving policy architecture that will affect everything from frontier AI research to the functioning of the world’s second-largest economy, from large language models in Africa to autonomous vehicles in Europe. U.S. political leaders often warn against letting China “write the rules of the road” in AI governance. But if the United States is serious about competing for global leadership in AI governance, then it needs to actually understand what it is competing against. That requires examining the nuts and bolts of both China’s AI regulations and the policy process that shaped them. This paper is the second in a series breaking down China’s AI regulations and pulling back the curtain on the policymaking process shaping them. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government started that process with the 2021 rules on recommendation algorithms, an omnipresent use of the technology that is often overlooked in international AI governance discourse. Those rules imposed new obligations on companies to intervene in content recommendations, granted new rights to users being recommended content, and offered protections to gig workers subject to algorithmic scheduling. The Chinese party-state quickly followed up with a new regulation on “deep synthesis,” the use of AI to generate synthetic media such as deepfakes. Those rules required AI providers to watermark AI-generated content and ensure that content does not violate people’s “likeness rights” or harm the “nation’s image.” Together, these two regulations also created and amended China’s algorithm registry, a regulatory tool that would evolve into a cornerstone of the country’s AI governance regime. Contrary to popular conception in the rest of the world, China’s AI governance regime has not been created by top-down edicts from CCP leadership. President Xi Jinping and other top CCP leaders will sometimes give high-level guidance on policy priorities, but they have not been the key players when it comes to shaping China’s AI regulations. Instead, those regulations have been the product of a dynamic and iterative policymaking process driven by a mix of actors from both inside and outside the Chinese party-state. Those actors include mid-level bureaucrats, academics, technologists, journalists, and policy researchers at platform tech companies. Through a mix of public advocacy, intellectual debate, technical workshopping, and bureaucratic wrangling, these actors laid the foundations for China’s present and future AI regulations. This paper traces the progression of these regulations through the “policy funnel” (see figure 1) of Chinese AI governance. For both recommendation algorithms and deep synthesis rules, the initial spark for the regulation came from long-standing CCP concerns about the creation and dissemination of online content. For the former, the rise of the algorithmically driven news app Toutiao threatened the CCP’s ability to set a unified narrative and choose which stories are pushed to readers. In the case of deep synthesis, online face swap videos grabbed the attention of the Chinese public and led government regulators to consider the threat of deepfakes. Over the course of 2017–2020, these concerns made their way through China’s bureaucracy. Regulators took a series of stopgap measures in specific applications, while also tasking policy analysts and government-adjacent technical organizations with exploring different regulatory interventions.
Topic:: Science and Technology, Governance, Regulation, and Artificial Intelligence
Political Geography:: China, East Asia, and Asia

375. The risk of artificial intelligence: China edition

Author:: Filip Jirouš
Publication Date:: 04-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL)
Abstract:: We should be worried about China’s AI capacities, not only because it enhances the powers of the Party-state, but also because it is exporting its population control technology and policy abroad.
Topic:: Science and Technology, Governance, Authoritarianism, Surveillance, Artificial Intelligence, Social Control, and Threat Assessment
Political Geography:: China and Asia

376. Starr Forum: China: The Rise and Fall of the EAST

Author:: Yasheng Huang and Will Knight
Publication Date:: 04-2024
Content Type:: Video
Institution:: MIT Center for International Studies
Abstract:: Speaker: Yasheng Huang, Epoch Foundation Professor of Global Economics and Management, MIT Sloan School of Management, and faculty director of the MIT-China Program at the Center for International Studies. Discussant: Will Knight, senior writer, Wired magazine, covers artificial intelligence and other emerging technology. He was previously a senior editor at MIT Technology Review, where he wrote about fundamental advances in AI and China’s AI boom.
Topic:: Science and Technology, Geopolitics, and Autocracy
Political Geography:: China and Asia

377. US Hegemony in Latin America: Think Tanks and the Formation of Consensus about the Chinese Presence

Author:: Luciana Wietchikoski and Livia Peres Milani
Publication Date:: 05-2024
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (RBPI)
Institution:: Instituto Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais (IBRI)
Abstract:: In recent years, U.S. government agencies have defined the Chinese presence in Latin America as a challenge, which has organized foreign policy towards the region. Departing from a neo-Gramscian approach, this paper investigates the bibliographical production of U.S. think tanks and seeks to understand the construction of consensus about the Chinese presence in Latin America. The methodology is based on content analysis and we identified two main narratives: in the first, the Chinese presence is presented as a threat to U.S. regional hegemony; in the second, the Chinese adaptation to liberal precepts is sought. There are therefore nuances in how the Chinese power is perceived, although the discourses remain restricted to the promotion of capitalism and neoliberalism under U.S. leadership.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Hegemony, and Think Tanks
Political Geography:: China, Latin America, North America, and United States of America

378. Palestine: Public Opinion Report 2023, Part 2

Author:: Khalil Shikaki
Publication Date:: 02-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Arab Barometer
Abstract:: Palestinians see the Israeli occupation as the most critical threat facing Palestine and their most preferred countries are Turkey, Qatar, and China. In a comparison between China's and U.S. foreign policies, the Palestinian public views China's policies more positively than those of the U.S. on all issues at hand. Wide-ranging opposition to Arab normalization with Israel remains as strong as it was two years ago, but most express optimism about the world's solidarity with the Palestinians, and the vast majority expresses opposition to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. These are the results of the latest wave of the Arab Barometer (AB) poll in Palestine, the 8th to be conducted since the start of these polls in the Arab World. The poll was conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip essentially during the period immediately before the start of the October the 7th war in the Gaza Strip and its envelop on the Israeli side. The period leading up to the poll witnessed a number of important developments, including the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords. The period saw a rise in the number of Israeli incursions into Palestinian cities and refugee camps, particularly in the northern parts of the West Bank. During this period, Palestinian factional leaders met in City of El Alamein in Egypt in the presence of President Abbas but failed to agree on a joint statement. During this period, settler terrorist acts in Palestinian areas of the West Bank increased, as did armed attacks by Palestinians against settlers and Israelis. Finally, there have been press reports that there are US-Saudi negotiations to reach an agreement to normalize SaudiIsraeli relations and that Palestinian-Saudi and Palestinian-American meetings have been held to set Palestinian conditions for this normalization agreement. This report is the second in a series of reports that cover the findings of the current wave of AB. It addresses one important issues covered by AB8: Palestinian perception of various international and regional actors and other international relations issues. While the focus is placed on the findings of AB8 regarding these topics, the report sets to compare these findings with those obtained by PSR in AB7, conducted two years earlier, and one poll conducted after AB8.
Topic:: International Relations, Foreign Policy, Public Opinion, Normalization, and October 7
Political Geography:: China, Turkey, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Qatar

379. Lessons from China's fiscal policy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Author:: Tianlei Huang
Publication Date:: 03-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE)
Abstract:: Expansionary fiscal policy helped China's economy grow in 2020, a year in which most economies contracted because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid a broader pivot to policy and regulatory tightening, fiscal support was withdrawn in 2021. In 2022, government budget turned expansionary to ensure economic stability ahead of the Communist Party Congress, but the execution fell short and fiscal policy ended up being weaker than planned. A recurrent problem during the pandemic, however, was that local governments did not fully spend their budgets. Aside from the sharp drop in local governments' land sale revenue in 2022, which dragged down their spending, it was also caused by local governments' failure to fully utilize their special bond quotas approved by the central government for capital investment. China's fiscal policy during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights four issues with implications for fiscal policy making. First, the government needs to avoid projecting unrealistically high land sale revenue in its budgets. Second, it needs to reconsider its problematic use of local-government special bond as a major fiscal stimulus instrument. Third, it needs to make sure its deficit, growth, and inflation targets are consistent. Last, Beijing needs to be more tolerant of higher fiscal deficits, at a minimum ensuring that overall fiscal spending grows at least as rapidly as nominal output.
Topic:: Budget, Economic Growth, Fiscal Policy, COVID-19, and Fiscal Deficit
Political Geography:: China and Asia

380. China’s Perspective on Economic Security

Author:: Audrye Wong
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)
Abstract:: This paper examines how Beijing views economic security as well as other countries’ actions in this realm. Economic security is not a new or foreign concept to Chinese thinkers and policymakers, but the emphases, concerns, and priorities have evolved, due in part to changes in the international environment as well as in China’s own economic and geopolitical situation. This paper examines how Chinese leaders and scholars have approached the definition and scope of economic security, as well as recent and proposed policy responses. It draws on a range of Chinese-language official documents and scholarly writings, as well as broader secondary source analyses. The paper explores that while Chinese discussions of economic security tend to be framed as ensuring economic development and stability, development is implicitly and explicitly linked to national security. Many writings emphasize that economics is the foundation for national strength (including military capabilities). As such, it is more than just economic survival and growth for the economy’s sake; it also has implications for China’s geopolitical position in the international order. In that respect, economic stability and national security may be hard to separate. Indeed, we see a resurgence in today’s rhetoric about the notions of development and security as inextricably linked, along with the need to coordinate the two—and in service of maintaining CCP rule and regime stability. Finally, the paper shows Beijing is taking concrete steps toward increased legalization and institutionalization of economic security measures. This represents a shift, at least in the domain of retaliatory countermeasures, from its usually more “informal” approach to economic coercion, which has afforded more flexibility and minimized political costs for the regime. At the same time, actual implementation has been relatively limited thus far.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Development, National Security, Trade Wars, and Economic Security
Political Geography:: China and Asia

381. South Korea: Caught in the Crosshairs of U.S.−China Competition Over Semiconductors

Author:: Paul Triolo
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)
Abstract:: This paper explores how countries with advanced semiconductor industries are caught in the middle of the growing U.S.-China competition in technology that is focused on advanced computing. Among them, South Korea and its national champions, Samsung and SK Hynix, have arguably incurred some of the most significant pressure. This paper explores how those firms have billions of dollars of sunk investment in China-based facilities producing cutting-edge memory, and the future of these facilities remains in doubt after a series of U.S. export control measures unleashed by the U.S. Commerce Department starting in October 2022. South Korean companies are also players in other parts of the global semiconductor supply chain, including semiconductor manufacturing tools, and China remains an important market for both components and electronic devices. This paper argues that each country caught between the United States and China in technology competition faces difficult trade-offs in determining how best to support its leading companies while navigating changing and often what is viewed as arbitrary decisions coming from Washington that have already significantly disrupted global supply chains. Finally, at the same time as U.S. export controls are having a major impact on the ability of South Korean companies to retain business operations and market access in China, major front-end manufacturers, particularly Samsung, are also looking to expand their operations in the United States and benefit from U.S. CHIPS Act funding. This paper argues that all of the above dynamics put South Korea in one of the more complex positions as the industry faces continued restructuring, buffeted by both export controls and industrial policies.
Topic:: Supply Chains, Economic Security, Semiconductors, and Economic Competition
Political Geography:: China, Asia, South Korea, and United States of America

382. Economic Security and U.S.-China Competition: The View from North Korea

Author:: Rachel Minyoung Lee
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI)
Abstract:: This paper argues that while North Korea does not discuss “economic security” in domestic contexts or have an established definition of the term, it thoroughly understands that the economy and national security are inseparable. North Korea is essentially unaffected by the typical economic issues that many major economies are grappling with in relation to economic security, but like other countries, it has closely tracked economic security developments and deepening U.S.-China strategic competition for potential political fallout and what opportunities and challenges that may generate. The paper shows that U.S.-China strategic competition has offered unique opportunities to North Korea, including China’s cover against fresh and existing sanctions against North Korea, and economic assistance. Moreover, deteriorating U.S.-China ties provide Pyongyang extra space to consider and put into motion alternative foreign and economic policy paths, namely, shifting away from its three-decade policy of nonalignment with China and normalization of relations with the United States. Also, China appears to be a factor in North Korea’s shift to a more conservative economic policy. Despite the opportunities presented by the U.S.-China divide, however, North Korea is wary of the risks of dependence on China and has tried to build economic resilience at home, for example by launching a national campaign on domestic production and recycling. North Korea’s somewhat cooler handling of China and its proportionately warm treatment of Russia since the Armistice Day celebrations in July is a clear example of North Korea’s China dilemma. This is where North Korea’s recent strengthening of ties with Russia comes into the picture. The paper contends that it is hard to conclude at this point whether North Korea’s moves are aimed at short-term, tactical gains or are part of a longer-term, strategic calculus, but we can be certain of this: it has just as much to gain or lose as any other country affected by economic security and U.S.-China strategic competition, though not in the same ways as other countries.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Strategic Competition, and Economic Security
Political Geography:: China, Asia, North Korea, and United States of America

383. False promises: The authoritarian development models of China and Russia

Author:: Joseph Lemoine, Dan Negrea, Patrick Quirk, and Lauren Van Metre
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Atlantic Council
Abstract:: Are authoritarian regimes more successful than free countries in offering prosperity to their people? The answer is decidedly no, yet China and Russia actively advertise the “benefits” and “promise” of their authoritarian development model. Beijing and Moscow contend that their governance model—rooted in central control of political, social, and economic life—delivers for their people. The facts prove exactly the opposite and show that countries characterized by repression and concentrated control are far less successful across all metrics of human development than are free societies. That free societies are better for the people residing in them is not an ideological position; it is a statement of fact backed by substantial evidence, including, but not limited to, the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Indexes. This paper aims to showcase why and how the authoritarian development model is inferior to that of free societies. The first section documents democratic backsliding and the reversal of freedom’s fortunes. The second section presents data on how authoritarian regimes have failed to deliver prosperity for their people. The third section outlines how free societies have done the opposite—delivered sustained prosperity for their citizens. The final section offers the conclusion that authoritarian regimes, despite their claims, cannot deliver democratic progress or prosperity for society at large.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Development, Diplomacy, Politics, Authoritarianism, Reform, and Democratic Transitions
Political Geography:: Russia, China, Europe, and Asia

384. Requirements for nuclear deterrence and arms control in a two-nuclear-peer environment

Author:: Gregory Weaver and Amy Woolf
Publication Date:: 02-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Atlantic Council
Abstract:: After decades of seeking to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in international relations, the United States is now grappling with a global landscape marked by intense strategic competition and the growing salience of nuclear weapons—problems that will likely persist for years to come. Over the past year, Russia compounded its aggression in Ukraine with nuclear saber-rattling, modernizing and expanding its nuclear forces over the past decade. Furthermore, Russia’s possession of a substantial inventory of theater nuclear weapons continues to threaten regional deterrence. Meanwhile, in Asia, Beijing is pursuing an unprecedented surge in its nuclear capabilities. If current trends persist, China is projected to possess about 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035.1 While China was once viewed as a secondary nuclear power, its substantial investment in its nuclear arsenal—including the launch of a third ballistic missile early-warning satellite in 2022 and advancements in land-based ballistic missiles, aircraft, submarines, and hypersonic missiles—positions China to become a near-equal nuclear power in the coming decade. These trends mark a historic shift. For the first time in its history, the United States must face two near-peer nuclear competitors simultaneously. At the same time, Russia’s suspension of its compliance with the New START agreement in 2023 has significantly weakened the last strategic arms control framework established in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. This move leaves scant provisions governing the future of nuclear capabilities among the United States and its adversaries. For over half a century, Washington and Moscow negotiated to establish treaties that imposed limits on their nuclear arsenals, aiming to manage their nuclear rivalry and mitigate the risk of nuclear conflict. This process served the national security interests of both sides by curbing weapons and activities that could jeopardize deterrence, safeguarding strategic stability, offering insights into nuclear capacities, and potentially steering military competition toward less perilous avenues. However, shifts in the global security landscape have altered this calculus. The Russian Federation, much like the Soviet Union before it, has insisted that future agreements factor in the nuclear capabilities of Britain and France. On the other hand, the United States now confronts a security environment featuring two nuclear-armed adversaries—Russia and China—whose forces will potentially pose significant threats to the United States and its allies. This evolving security landscape may prompt the United States to reevaluate its assessments of its deterrence and arms control requirements. But how should the United States approach this problem?
Topic:: Defense Policy, Arms Control and Proliferation, National Security, Nuclear Weapons, Science and Technology, and Deterrence
Political Geography:: Russia, China, Asia, Korea, and United States of America

385. Geoeconomic fragmentation and net-zero targets

Author:: Shirin Hakim and Amin Mohseni-Cheraghlou
Publication Date:: 04-2024
Content Type:: Policy Brief
Institution:: Atlantic Council
Abstract:: The second half of the twentieth century experienced significant economic integration. International trade, cross-border migration, capital flows, and technological diffusion increased per capita incomes across countries and reduced global poverty. However, events such as the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic—all against the backdrop of escalating great power rivalry and tensions between the United States and China—have demonstrated the rise of geoeconomic fragmentation (GEF). Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, a growing numberof world leaders have addressed the impacts of GEF on global energy and agricultural markets. For one, higher and increasingly volatile food and energy prices have made it increasingly difficult for developing nations to prioritize environmental concerns and implement sustainable development initiatives.
Topic:: Climate Change, Environment, International Trade and Finance, Economy, Economic Growth, Inclusion, Energy, Geoeconomics, and Net Zero
Political Geography:: China, Asia, and United States of America

386. How Huawei Weathered the Storm: Resilience, Market Conditions or Failed Sanctions?

Author:: Hosuk Lee-Makiyama and Robin Baker
Publication Date:: 02-2024
Content Type:: Policy Brief
Institution:: European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE)
Abstract:: Huawei is exhibiting stoic resilience in the face of US sanctions, economic downturns, and the slow pace of 5G investments. There is a narrative that the company has been propped up by the Chinese government, but the key to Huawei’s resilience is multifaceted. Through pre-emptive stockpiling and ingenuity, the company has continued to fulfil its base station orders and defend its market shares abroad. Concurrently, Huawei has made an autonomous business decision to reinvest its earnings and intensify R&D to secure its supply chains against political risks and diversify into new business areas. Successful forays into semiconductors, cloud services and energy grids have also been facilitated by a capital structure that lends itself to long-term planning. Huawei’s survival is not necessarily a lesson in the futility of sanctions to stifle technological progress. However, it does show that muddled political objectives and inconsistent implementation will yield potentially contrary outcomes. At the same time, factors that contribute to Huawei’s resilience also highlight the infighting and vulnerabilities of listed firms like Mavenir, Ericsson and Nokia.
Topic:: Markets, Sanctions, Digital Economy, Resilience, and Huawei
Political Geography:: China, North America, and United States of America

387. What if…? 12 Dragon King scenarios for 2028

Author:: Florence Gaub
Publication Date:: 03-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: NATO Defense College
Abstract:: At first glance, this publication appears to be a collection of Early Warning essays – they are, to some extent, but they should not be exclusively read as such. Conventional Early Warning systems have a much shorter time horizon – normally hours, perhaps months at most – than these scenarios, and they are solely mitigation mechanisms, that is to say they provide no insight into how the event they are warning of can be avoided. They are thus not an intellectual thought exercise, but solely an alarm bell. Our Dragon Kings in this volume provide insight into how they can be avoided, but they also challenge our assumptions in more ways than one. They are therefore awareness-raisers no matter how credible or plausible you will find them. Just reading them will have a readiness-increasing effect. (In fact, the more absurd you find them, the more pronounced this is because your mind will learn more when the emotion they generate is greater.) These scenarios can become even more useful, however, if you use them for simulation exercises in a team. You can use them as a blueprint for a wider scenario exercise, whether one wishes to adopt a blue or red team approach to them, and ask questions such as: how could this have been prevented, what would have to be done? What are alternative pathways of this scenario that are even worse, and how can we prevent those? The most important aspect is that every exercise of this kind must lead to some concrete policy steps. Merely thinking about improbable futures is never enough – doing something about them is what makes them a useful policy-tool. In that case, they lead to active, rather than passive, engagement with the content, foster collaboration, encourage innovation, practice decision-making, provide a space for failure and experimentation with alternative courses of action. It is precisely because of this that scenarios are a common feature in military education, but they work just as well in any other strategic context – provided, time and space is made for it. If yes, they contribute to increasing preparedness and readiness, and accelerate the response time to surprise. What’s more, generally engaging in fringe thinking about the future will strengthen these capabilities no matter what kind of surprise eventually occurs. Much like how vaccines teach the immune system, disruptive thinking strengthens our neural networks, making us more resilient for extreme situations.
Topic:: NATO, Natural Disasters, Elections, Crisis Management, Coup, UN Security Council, Biological Weapons, Resilience, Arctic Council, and Readiness
Political Geography:: Russia, China, Iraq, Europe, India, Taiwan, Latin America, Nigeria, and Tunisia

388. The history of China’s future Lessons from the CIA

Author:: Dylan Levi King
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: NATO Defense College
Abstract:: Predictions about China’s future made in the years since the Communist Party took power in 1949 have routinely cycled between two extremes of improbability: imminent collapse and indomitable ascent. These cycles came more slowly in the age before cable news and social media. The idea of the capture of the People’s Republic of China by Republic of China forces, or of the country tearing itself apart with political violence, held for years, before being wiped out by a popular impression of China’s meteoric rise and future economic domination.1 These cycles have now become supercharged for the attention economy. As one wave of forecasts of unstoppable lift-off and financial supremacy breaks, it is chased immediately by predictions of terminal economic dysfunction and social disintegration. For the expert, in danger of having their voice drowned out by amateur forecasters, it is difficult to inject the necessary rigour and nuance. For the layperson, it is hard to make any sense of the incessant deluge of contradictory and often extreme predictions. To wade into the forecast cycle is to risk being swept off one’s feet. To step away, and to simply avoid making any predictions is tempting, but it would be a grave error, given China’s economic gravity, immense population, status as a superpower and potential rival of NATO and allied countries. To get the future of the country wrong is to get the future of the planet wrong.
Topic:: History, Forecast, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Readiness
Political Geography:: China and Asia

389. NATO and a Taiwan contingency

Author:: James Lee
Publication Date:: 02-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: NATO Defense College
Abstract:: This paper Discusses the conditions under which a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5. Explains how individual NATO countries already play a role in Taiwan’s security. Outlines scenarios under which individual NATO countries could become directly involved in a Taiwan contingency.
Topic:: Security, NATO, and Crisis Management
Political Geography:: China, Taiwan, and Asia

390. Decoding China’s Technology and Industrial Policy: Seven Terms You Need to Know

Author:: Barry Naughton, Siwen Xiao, and Yaosheng Xu
Publication Date:: 03-2024
Content Type:: Policy Brief
Institution:: University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC)
Abstract:: China’s technology and industrial policy programs have grown in scope and intensity since 2020, but the vocabulary used to describe them is vague and often misleading. This policy brief decodes seven essential terms and shows that they have concrete and complementary meanings. When understood in concert, they reveal the establishment of a large-scale, government-directed program of mission-oriented research, development, and application. Together these terms outline a substantial expansion of the Chinese government’s direct role in organizing economic activity, and hint at some of the limits of that expansion.
Topic:: Economics, Industrial Policy, Science and Technology, Research and Development, and Terminology
Political Geography:: China and Asia

391. The Quantum Race: U.S.-Chinese Competition for Leadership in Quantum Technologies

Author:: Juljan Krause
Publication Date:: 02-2024
Content Type:: Policy Brief
Institution:: University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC)
Abstract:: Quantum computing is poised to unleash innovation across various sectors, from materials science to pharmaceutical and medical research, finance, logistics, and even climate change management. Quantum computing also has the potential to provide the backbone for future artificial intelligence and autonomous systems that cannot be realized with digital hardware alone, while quantum communication can strengthen security in cyberspace. For these reasons, quantum technologies feature prominently in the emerging technologies race between the United States and China. In this policy brief, IGCC postdoctoral fellow Juljan Krause analyzes China’s advances in quantum communication, which aim to signal China’s technological leadership while protecting Chinese communications from foreign surveillance. He argues that Chinese leadership in quantum communication will have strategic repercussions, particularly as it is likely to give China’s efforts to shape global industry standards additional momentum. Even if quantum communication has no immediate military implications, policymakers should consider how the technology could embolden China further.
Topic:: Industrial Policy, Science and Technology, Innovation, and Quantum Computers
Political Geography:: China, Asia, and Indo-Pacific

392. The Sky Is Not the Limit. Geopolitics and Economics of the New Space Race

Author:: Alessandro Gili
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI)
Abstract:: Space is a contested domain for its very nature and today it is evidently becoming an increasingly important enabler of economic and military power. An increasing number of actors, infrastructures and technologies deployed in space also raises concerns for safety and security, especially in cyberspace. Many countries are striving to achieve space capabilities and autonomous access to space, and this is having a tremendous geopolitical impact, especially since space is emerging as an increasingly critical military and strategic domain. The development of the new space economy, which is increasingly involving the private sector and many industrial actors and services, will also be a game changer for the international economy. The space race likewise implies disruptive technologies that could contribute massively to the energy and digital transitions, accelerating solutions that could benefit humanity. A new international governance system for space is therefore needed urgently, considering that the current rules are no longer able to respond to a sector evolving at such a rapid pace. Which actors are leading the race? Which economic sectors could benefit the most and what could the new space economy mean for the world? How is space emerging as a military domain against a backdrop of increasing international tensions? What would a new system of global governance for space look like?
Topic:: Economics, Politics, Infrastructure, Geopolitics, Regulation, and Energy Security
Political Geography:: Russia, China, Europe, India, Italy, Global Focus, United States of America, and Space

393. Unpacking China’s industrial policy and its implications for Europe

Author:: Alicia Garcia-Herrero and Robin Schindowski
Publication Date:: 05-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Bruegel
Abstract:: China is often credited with a successful application of industrial policy. One important particularity of China’s industrial policy is that it aims at levelling the playing field between the state economy and the private economy in access to finance, yet within a framework of strategic goals. This aim is not relevant for market economies, such as those of the European Union, but only for those where state enterprises are clearly privileged. Notwithstanding the difficulties in making valid comparisons, our analysis of how China conducts industrial policy in a variety of sectors points to success in some sectors but not all. More importantly, productivity growth in China has already been declining for two decades. Given the very large resources that China has put into industrial policy, with subsidies being only one part, it is surprising that success is not more evident. This relates partly to factors including cronyism and regional protectionism. While the former might be less relevant for the EU given the different institutional background, the latter certainly is relevant since the EU faces the potential consequences of member country-level industrial policy for its single market. A lesson from China seems to come from the sectoral focus, with a long-term and economic-security mindset. The EU is far from this, but it is in the process of linking economic security to industrial policy. Finally, responding to China’s industrial policy involves diverse investigations and challenges in measuring subsidies accurately. Understanding China’s very diverse and complex approach to helping companies achieve the government’s industrial policy goals is crucial for anticipating the consequences of China’s actions. These could be positive, such as cheaper imports of green technology, or negative, such as Chinese overcapacity spilling over to the EU single market.
Topic:: Industrial Policy, Markets, European Union, and Economy
Political Geography:: China, Europe, and Asia

394. How to de-risk: European economic security in a world of interdependence

Author:: Jean Pisani-Ferry, Beatrice Weder di Mauro, and Jeromin Zettelmeyer
Publication Date:: 05-2024
Content Type:: Policy Brief
Institution:: Bruegel
Abstract:: Pandemic-related supply disruptions, the energy crisis provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and economic coercion by China have put economic security high on the European Union policy agenda. The question is how exactly the EU should ‘de-risk’ its external economic relationships without foregoing the benefits of trade. The standard answer is that it should identify product-level trade dependencies, mainly on the import side, and reduce them, mainly through diversification of suppliers, while otherwise maintaining maximum trade integration. This Policy Brief argues that this answer falls short. First, product-level dependencies cannot be identified reliably even with sophisticated analysis and data. As a result, both ‘missed dependencies’ and ‘false positives’ are inevitable. Second, external shocks and coercion could be propagated through exports, productive assets held abroad and financial channels as much as through imports. The analysis has five main implications Import de-risking should focus on a few product categories for which the costs of supply interruptions would be unquestionably large. This reduces false positives. De-risking and/or buffers to deal with exports and financial coercion require more attention. De-risking must be complemented by raising resilience against all shocks, whatever theirorigin. This requires a deeper and broader European single market. De-risking and resilience must be complemented by deterrence. A sufficiently high probability of chronic trade conflict – or one very large conflict – may justify reducing overall integration with a large trading partner, on both the export andimport sides. EU economic security policies have been right to emphasise the reduction of import dependence on chips and critical raw materials, and the creation of a powerful legal instrument to deter coercion (the Anti-Coercion Instrument). In most other respects, there is room for improvement.
Topic:: European Union, Risk, Trade, Imports, Economic Security, and Interdependence
Political Geography:: China and Europe

395. Global supply chains: lessons from a decade of disruption

Author:: Luca Léry Moffat and Niclas Poitiers
Publication Date:: 03-2024
Content Type:: Working Paper
Institution:: Bruegel
Abstract:: This paper explores both the character and impact of three recent shocks to global supply chains: the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US-China trade war. These were large shocks which have had significant impacts on domestic and international supply chains, but these impacts have differed in their longevity, economic impact and policy responses. We show that supply chains were remarkably resilient against shocks of such magnitude. However, this resilience was also achieved thanks to the equally remarkable size and scope of policy responses and global supply chain reorganisation. We recommend that pre-emptive policies may be justified to shield households and industry from future shocks. Given the entangled nature of these shocks and that their effects continue to reverberate, we emphasise the need for extensive future research to understand the nature of these shocks and the effectiveness of policy responses.
Topic:: Global Markets, Trade Wars, Trade, COVID-19, Supply Chains, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:: China, Global Focus, and United States of America

396. Geopolitics in the Pacific Islands: Playing for advantage

Author:: Meg Keen and Alan Tidwell
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Policy Brief
Institution:: Lowy Institute for International Policy
Abstract:: Pacific Islands Countries are leveraging geopolitical rivalries to maximise their development options. But unmanaged competition for influence among key development partners can compromise good governance and privilege geopolitical posturing over local priorities. Australia, the United States, and other traditional donors can capitalise on areas of strength, such as social inclusion and regional and multilateral initiatives. Joint efforts along these lines and the pooling of resources would scale up impact and set higher accountability standards. Despite the risk that higher standards will open gaps for non-traditional donors with less burdensome criteria, there is much long-term value in traditional development partners collaborating in a “race to the top” in meeting the region’s needs.
Topic:: Foreign Policy, Development, Regional Cooperation, Foreign Aid, Geopolitics, and Donors
Political Geography:: China, Australia, Australia/Pacific, United States of America, and Pacific Islands

397. China Threats and the Exploitation of China Threats: The 2024 Taiwan General Election

Author:: Chin-en Wu
Publication Date:: 01-2024
Content Type:: Commentary and Analysis
Institution:: East Asia Institute (EAI)
Abstract:: The presidential and legislative elections took place in Taiwan on January 13, 2024. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP or so-called the green camp) selected Vice President Lai Ching-te as their candidate, who also serves as the party chairman. The opposing Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT or so-called the blue camp) nominated the incumbent mayor of New Taipei, Hou Yu-ih, for the presidential candidacy. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP or so-called the white camp) chose its leader, former Taipei City mayor Ko Wen-je, as the presidential candidate. Despite initial plans for a joint campaign team between KMT and TPP, a final agreement was not reached. Lai’s victory marked a historic moment, representing the first time since the introduction of direct elections in 1996 that a party has won more than two consecutive presidential terms. Lai secured the presidency with 40% of the votes, followed by Hou with 34%, and Ko with 26%. Lai Ching-te and Hou Yu-yi are political figures within traditional political parties, lacking individual charisma, especially Hou Yu-yi, the former police-in-chief. Ko Wen-je, on the other hand, is a candidate with populist characteristics, appearing as a political outsider at the national level, free from the burden of past ruling records, providing an option beyond the blue-green divide. His interactive style sometimes resembles that of an internet celebrity, using straightforward language to comment on issues or point out social and political problems, in many cases without proposing feasible solutions to these problems. Young people prefer Ko’s relaxed, somewhat sarcastic way of communication. The other part of the general election is the legislative election. DPP gained 51 seats out of 113 seats and lose its majority in the parliament. KMT won 52 seats and become the largest party. TPP gained eight seats. The result makes the new DPP government a minority government.
Topic:: Elections, Domestic Politics, and Cross-Strait Relations
Political Geography:: China, Taiwan, and Asia

398. Climate Change in China’s Governance: Agenda, Agents, and International Collaboration

Author:: Guoguang Wu
Publication Date:: 06-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: China is the world's leading emitter and a key player in the international community's fight against climate change, but its climate action remains underpinned by a black box of policies, actors, and international influences. As China accelerates action to achieve domestic and international climate goals, it is more important than ever to detangle these webs and peer into the black box, to develop an understanding of what motivates China's decision-makers and how climate policy choices are made. In this insightful new report, Climate Change in China’s Governance: Agenda, Agents, and International Collaboration, Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis Senior Fellow on Chinese Politics Guoguang Wu conducts an in-depth investigation of China’s climate-related policies, politics, governance, and international relations. He finds that the Xi Jinping administration has paid special attention to climate action by advancing the green technology revolution and reducing energy dependence. However, at the same time, there are signs that China may be relaxing rather than strengthening its climate commitment. By conducting a deep dive into the evolving political actors and departments working on China’s climate agenda, Guoguang finds that ultra-concentrated political power and fragmented governance under Xi and the Chinese Communist Party pose obstacles to China’s climate action over the next five years.
Topic:: International Relations, Climate Change, Governance, and Green Technology
Political Geography:: China and Asia

399. Green Hydrogen for Decarbonizing Asia's Industrial Giants

Author:: Asia Society Policy Institute
Publication Date:: 04-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: Asia’s transformation in recent decades into a global manufacturing hub has fueled economic growth and lifted millions out of poverty. However, this success has also massively increased the region’s emissions footprint, making it essential for Asia’s industries to rapidly transition to green technologies and processes. “Green Hydrogen for Decarbonizing Asia’s Industrial Giants” assesses the future potential and trajectory for electrolyzers needed to meet green hydrogen (H2) demand in Asia’s four largest economies: China, India, Japan, and South Korea. The report, which was commissioned by the High-level Policy Commission on Getting Asia to Net Zero and carried out by Global Efficiency Intelligence, highlights the role of manufacturers as agents of change in the Asia’s net zero transition. The study focuses on the role of green H2 in three priority industries — steel, ammonia, and methanol — under various decarbonization scenarios. In these sectors, green H2 has the capacity to significantly reduce emissions by replacing carbon-intensive processes with renewable energy-powered electrolysis. Should the four countries adhere to their declared net zero targets, the collective market potential of electrolyzers for these industries is expected to skyrocket to $180 billion by 2050, with a compound annual growth rate as high as 12% between 2030 and 2040. This is nearly five times as large as the market potential under a business-as-usual scenario. The report offers a suite of recommendations for policymakers, industry players, investors, and think thanks aimed at accelerating the development and adoption of green H2 and electrolyzer manufacturing. These targeted strategies aim to collectively support a robust ecosystem for green H2 production and use in these countries toward a net zero industry.
Topic:: Industry, Carbon Emissions, Decarbonization, Hydrogen, and Net Zero
Political Geography:: Japan, China, India, Asia, and South Korea

400. The Limits of Cooperation in Northeast Asia: Japan-ROK-China Relations After the Fukushima Wastewater Release

Author:: Daria Kurushina
Publication Date:: 03-2024
Content Type:: Special Report
Institution:: Asia Society
Abstract:: More than a decade after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that hit northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, causing the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the aftermath of the “triple disaster” continues to shape perceptions of Japan among its neighbors. The Japanese government’s decision to release into the sea more than a million tons of treated radioactive wastewater stored at the wrecked Fukushima plant beginning on August 24, 2023, decisively shifted the narrative of Japan’s experience: whereas the country was once viewed as the victim of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters, it came to be seen by many in Northeast Asia as an atomic chemical antagonist. Following the announcement of the wastewater release, Japan faced an immediate backlash from neighboring countries and the international community over environmental and health concerns. The decision divided public opinion in both Japan and the broader Asia-Pacific region and threatened Japan’s attempts to position itself as the leader of a free, fair, and open Indo-Pacific. The Japanese government’s decision particularly roiled the public in Northeast Asia, where anti-Japanese sentiment stemming from the collective memory of Japan’s military ambition, colonialism, and atrocities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries persists. Meanwhile, authorities in some countries, especially China, intentionally stirred historical grievances and distrust in an attempt to undermine the trilateral relationship among Japan, Korea, and the United States. However, are concerns about the wastewater release warranted? In a Comprehensive Safety Review[1] the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – the United Nations nuclear watchdog – determined that the release had no radiological impact on public health and the marine environment. Emphasizing the Fukushima plant’s compliance with “international safety standards,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi focused on the ongoing process of wastewater release and the Japanese’s government accountability for the water’s treatment, while also expressing concerns about the accumulation of tritium (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that cannot be removed) in the water and the importance of further research on the effects of the wastewater on marine life. Driven by health concerns, geopolitical dynamics, and the absence of regional consultation, the Japanese decision provoked a furious public backlash among Asia-Pacific nations, particularly in South Korea and China. Relations among Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and China have deteriorated in recent years amid rising security concerns over North Korea’s volatility, tensions between China and the United States, and wartime forced-labor reparations that caused long-term damage to Japan-ROK relations long before the rapprochement of 2023.[2] Participants in the Japan-ROK-China trilateral summit now have wastewater as another contentious topic to discuss during the renewed dialogue, which is scheduled to be convened in 2024. As the nuclear wastewater decision seems to have surfaced many thorny issues among the three countries, this paper seeks to explain the regional reaction to Japan’s decision, why this reaction matters, and how the trilateral relationship might evolve alongside the wastewater issue.
Topic:: International Cooperation, Regional Cooperation, Crisis Management, Fukushima Disaster, and Nuclear Energy
Political Geography:: Japan, China, Asia, South Korea, and Fukushima

Search

Search Constraints

Search Results

Refine your search

Topic

Political Geography

Content Type

Journal

Publishing Institution

Author

Publication Year

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS