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Pakistan's usefulness to China is only in South Asia, where it competes with India. But China has global ambitions; it is unlikely to sacrifice them for an ally that has proved a headache to the United States, which has its own deep relationship with China.

Being seen to take a provocative stand alongside Pakistan comes at a substantial cost, but provides little strategic benefit,

China, he wrote, does not want to push India deeper into the American orbit.

An escalation in Chinese aid to Pakistan would surely antagonise India, creating a new point of friction in the triangular relationship between Beijing, New Delhi, and Washington

China has also shown no sign that it is willing to shoulder some of the financial burden of propping up Pakistan that the United States has so far been willing to bear.

In 2008, when Pakistan was suffering a balance of payments crisis and sought China's support to avoid turning to the International Monetary Fund and its restrictive terms on a $7.5 billion loan, China provided only $500 million.

China may share concerns over Pakistan's stability, Venugopalan writes, "but it has preferred to let Americans bear the costs of improving the country's security".

"It is our misunderstanding if we think that we will team up with China if we are pressed by the United States," Rizvi said. "China and the United States have their own relations and they cannot compromise them for the sake of Pakistan."

A decades-old territorial squabble over the South China Sea is entering a new and more contentious chapter, as claimant nations search deeper into disputed waters for energy supplies while building up their navies and military alliances with other nations, particularly with the United States.Reed Bank, claimed by both China and the Philippines, is just one of several possible flashpoints in the South China Sea that could force Washington to intervene in defence of its Southeast Asian allies

Earlier this week Wen also promised to increase bilateral trade volumes with Germany [ID:nW8E7KD00A] and Poland [ID:nL5E8FOFAP] as part of a drive to diversify its foreign currency reserves, the world's largest at $3.3 trillion.

Poland, the largest eastern EU member and still outside the single currency area, is engaged in a large-scale infrastructure building programme and struggling to modernise its energy sector to curb reliance on highly polluting coal.Warsaw hopes for Chinese investments in those fields.China is interested in Poland's banking sector and wants to open branches of its banks, including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, its biggest lender, in Poland.

"We are pleased that Poland today is China's largest partner in central Europe, with trade volumes exceeding 14 billion euros in 2011," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, adding that the potential for trade between China and Poland and its regional peers was much bigger.

Poland is the only European Union member to have avoided recession since the 2008 start of the global financial crisis.

As part of the strategic pivot unveiled in January, the United States will deploy 60 per cent of its warships in the Asia-Pacific, up from 50 per cent now. They will include six aircraft carriers and a majority of the U.S. navy's cruisers, destroyers, littoral combat ships and submarines.

"Make no mistake, in a steady, deliberate and sustainable way, the United States military is rebalancing and bringing an enhanced capability development to this vital region," Panetta told the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security conference in Singapore attended by civilian and military leaders from Asia-Pacific and Western nations.

reports last week in China's state-controlled media and online military websites suggested that the first of a new class of a stealthy littoral combat frigate, the type 056, had been launched at Shanghai's Hudong shipyard with three others under construction.Naval analysts said the new 1,700-tonne ship, armed with a 76mm main gun, missiles and anti-submarine torpedoes, would be ideal for patrolling the South China Sea.These new warships would easily outgun the warships of rival claimants, they said.

As part of his swing through Asia last week, Panetta also visited India and Vietnam in a bid to enhance security ties with two key regional powers that have not been traditional U.S. allies but are increasingly apprehensive about China's rise.At Vietnam's deep water port of Cam Ranh Bay, a key U.S. base during the Vietnam War, Panetta said the use of this harbour would be important to the Pentagon as it moved more ships to Asia.

The fact that violence is still simmering in eastern Congo -- and despite the costs that extraction imposes on the Congolese people -- has not been enough to deter Beijing from wooing Congo's government for access to the country's abundant resources. So, if there's any thought that war in Afghanistan might dissuade Chinese investment there, it's best to dispense with that notion immediately.

China, which has a narrow land border with Afghanistan, already invests heavily in the war-torn Central Asian state. The state-owned China Metallurgical Group has a $3.5 billion copper mining venture in Logar province. Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei are building digital telephone switches, providing roughly 200,000 subscriber lines in Afghanistan. Even back in the war's early days in 2002 and 2003, when I worked in Afghanistan, the Chinese presence was acutely visible in Kabul, with Chinese laborers on many building sites and Chinese-run restaurants and guesthouses popping up all over the city. As Robert Kaplan has pointed out, these investments come with a gratuitous hidden subsidy from the United States -- which has defrayed the enormous costs of providing security amid war and looting.

With its massive wealth, appetite for risk, and willingness to underbid others on labor costs and human rights conditionality, China is the odds-on favorite for development of any new Afghan mineral resources. Chinese firms will control the flow of new funds, and the way those funds are distributed between the central and local governments. It's all well and good that Barack Obama's administration has recommitted to building civil projects in rural Afghanistan, but consider the relative scale of building a school to establishing a multimillion-dollar mine (not to mention the transport networks and infrastructure required to get the extracted minerals out) and it's easy to see what kind of influence the Chinese will bring to the table.

Although many have warned of a new Sino-colonialism, Brautigam's work suggests that perhaps China's awareness of its gargantuan and growing need for foreign export markets will make it a better "colonial" power than any European country ever was.

Stability in Pakistan should be an important goal for China. It is by now clear that the Taliban's campaign west of the Durand Line is inextricable from the destabilizing efforts of Islamist militants in Pakistan. If China does not want another nuclear basket case on its border, then it should care deeply about instability in Afghanistan. Currently, however, Beijing is still freeloading, relying on Washington to provide security for its limited interests. Perhaps the tantalizing prospect of $1 trillion in minerals might be enough to change the strategic equation.

"China has paid a huge political and social cost for the policy, as it has resulted in social conflict, high administrative costs and led indirectly to a long-term gender imbalance at birth," Xinhua said, citing the report.

But it remains unclear whether Chinese leaders are ready to take up the recommendations. China's National Population and Family Planning Commission had no immediate comment on the report on Tuesday.

The government limits most urban couples to one child, and allows two children for rural families if their first-born is a girl. There are numerous other exceptions as well, including looser rules for minority families and a two-child limit for parents who are themselves both singletons.

The government recognises those problems and has tried to address them by boosting social services for the elderly. It has also banned sex-selective abortion and rewarded rural families whose only child is a girl.

the one-child policy – introduced in 1980 as a temporary measure to curb the surging population

Though the government credits the policy with preventing hundreds of millions of births and helping lift countless families out of poverty, it is reviled by many ordinary people. The strict limits have led to forced abortions and sterilisations, even though such measures are illegal. Couples who flout the rules face hefty fines, seizure of their property and loss of their jobs.

Many demographers argue the policy has worsened the country's aging crisis by limiting the size of the young labour pool that must support the large baby boom generation as it retires. They say it has contributed to the imbalanced sex ratio by encouraging families to abort baby girls, preferring to try for a male heir.

Cai said the transition could keep population reform on the backburner or changes may be rushed through to help burnish the reputations of outgoing President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

leaders have so far expressed a desire to maintain the status quo. President Hu said last year that China would keep its strict family planning policy to keep the birth rate low and other officials have said that no changes are expected until at least 2015.

As the North's ties with South Korea and much of the outside world have soured, Kim has leaned more on ally Beijing for support, which has cost China both in economic aid and in strains with South Korea and other nations alarmed by North Korea's nuclear weapons development and military brinkmanship.China has sought to draw North Korea closer with incentives, and bilateral trade hit $3.1 billion in the first seven months of 2011, an 87 percent increase from the same period last year, according to Chinese customs statistics. Growth was propelled by a 169.2 percent jump in the value of Chinese imports.

Obama has expressed hope that a new resolution can be agreed within weeks, before the end of spring, to maintain pressure on Iran. But European diplomats have warned the talks could take much longer. They suggest June might be a more realistic target.

Previous large spending increases could explain the smaller increase this year. "China has achieved its targets in the past by providing continuous double-digit budget increases," said Andrew Yang, an expert on China's military who is now Taiwan's deputy defence minister.

Many experts believe the actual amount spent by China on its armed forces is far higher than the published amount.

In a recently published book, called The China Dream, a senior officer in China's People's Liberation Army said the country should aim to build a major military force that could challenge the US this century. Other officers attending the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body that holds a meeting at the same time as the parliamentary session, rejected that idea.

The Chinese "carry their responsibility" as one of the major world powers and "they need no suggestion from Saudi Arabia to do what they ought to do," Prince Saud said at a joint news conference with Clinton.

Saudi Arabia on Monday played down suggestions it could encourage China not to block sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme by giving Beijing oil supply guarantees.

Clinton's top assistant for the Middle East, Jeffrey Feltman, told reporters travelling with her that China had an "important trading relationship" with the Saudi oil kingpin.    "We would expect them (the Saudis) ... to use their relationship in ways that can help increase the pressure that Iran feels," said Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs.

Clinton said the United States was not aiming to use military action to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions but rather seeking to build support for tough new sanctions at the UN Security Council.    She said the package Washington wanted adopted "will be particularly aimed at those enterprises controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which we believe is in effect supplanting the government of Iran.

"We see the government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the parliament is being supplanted and Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship," she said.    "They are in charge of the nuclear programme."

Productivity, efficiency and safety are secondary to two overwhelming needs: to complete the network fast, so creating crucially needed jobs, and to be able to boast that China's capability is cheaper than anybody else's.

China is discovering that a sophisticated knowledge economy operating at the frontiers of technology is incompatible with an authoritarian one-party state.

There will be a Chinese Spring. And sooner than anyone expects.