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China had typically offered infrastructure-for-energy and other business deals.

“There is hope in the East,” one Arab businesswoman in the United Arabian Emirates told me.

The implications are clear: China has long represented an alternative in the global market for influence once dominated by Washington;

When six of the eight victims of this week’s shootings at Atlanta-area spas were confirmed to be of Asian descent, the news reopened wrenching debates in the United States about anti-Asian violence, bigotry and misogyny.

The South Korean consulate in Atlanta has said that four of the people who died in the attacks on three massage parlors on Tuesday were of Korean descent.

The two others of Asian descent are believed to have been of Chinese descent.

“China’s gas pipeline will be burned,” chanted a group of protesters in Myanmar this week on the route of a Chinese pipeline.

the pipeline has become a target for public anger over perceptions Beijing is backing the junta that seized power in a Feb. 1 coup.The rise in anti-China sentiment has raised questions in Myanmar business circles and in China, not only over the surge of Chinese investment in recent years but for billions of dollars earmarked for a strategic neighbour on Beijing’s “Belt and Road” infrastructure plan.

Protests over the pipeline flared after a Myanmar government document leaked from a Feb. 24 meeting showed Chinese officials had asked Myanmar’s junta to provide better security - and intelligence on ethnic minority armed groups on the pipeline route.

The leaders of Australia, Japan, India, and the United States will meet on Friday in a virtual summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, otherwise known as the Quad—the informal forum largely directed at possible Chinese threats.

portrayals of China’s overwhelming force are misleading—at least if you’re in Washington rather than New Delhi, which is genuinely outmatched. Even using outside estimates of China’s military budget, its spending—roughly $200 billion—is less than one-quarter of the annual U.S. defense budget of around $934 billion.

What makes the PLA a challenge for the United States isn’t its size or capabilities in absolute terms, but its concentration in a relatively narrow field: anti-access/area denial, or missile and electronic technology designed to raise the costs of military intervention anywhere close to China itself. For example, Chinese missiles, launched from bases along the coastline, could make it nearly impossible for the United States to move ships through local waters. This presents a serious problem for U.S. strategists, especially given growing Chinese aggression toward Taiwan.

China and Russia have announced plans to work together to construct a lunar research station, an ambitious first-ever such space project between the two countries.

Russia's Roscosmos and China's National Space Administration – the two countries' respective equivalents of NASA – announced a preliminary agreement on Tuesday to jointly develop the research facility, known as the International Lunar Research Station, or ILRS.

The proposed station, which once complete would be open to use by other countries, "is a comprehensive scientific experiment base with the capability of long-term autonomous operation,"

China is a major supplier of coronavirus vaccine, giving it enormous leverage in pandemic-ravaged nations. Brazil, recently hostile to the Chinese company Huawei, has suddenly changed its stance.

The Trump administration had been warning allies across the globe to shun Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, denouncing the company as a dangerous extension of China’s surveillance system.

With Covid-19 deaths rising to their highest levels yet, and a dangerous new virus variant stalking Brazil, the nation’s communications minister went to Beijing in February, met with Huawei executives at their headquarters and made a very unusual request of a telecommunication company.

The families of a group of Hong Kong activists who were detained fleeing the city in a speedboat in August called on Chinese authorities to issue verdicts soon after they were tried in a mainland court.

Shenzhen said the trials of 10 of the activists had ended and the verdicts would be announced at another time.

has drawn international attention and become a central issue for pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.

In 2020, China advanced its aspirations by simply emerging with its growth intact from a brutal year when a pandemic shook the world economy.

On Monday, Beijing said its gross domestic product rose 2.3% last year. While that is the weakest annual rate of growth since the Mao era, it was enough to make China the only major world economy to gain any ground at all last year, and accelerated its likely overtaking of the U.S. economy, economists say.

The World Bank projects the global economy to have pulled back by 4.3% last year, dragged down by a 7.4% contraction in the eurozone. The U.S., the world’s largest economy, is expected to have shrunk by 3.6%

China’s “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) initiative—yi dai yi lu in Mandarin Chinese—aims to connect seventy-one countries by land and sea. Highways and maritime routes will complement the “networks of connectivity” in trade, investment, finance, tourism, and even education between China and the world. OBOR is meant to be a form of diplomacy, development, and trade incentive all rolled into one. The initiative is constantly evolving in its scope; in fact, the Chinese government recently changed OBOR to “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in English.

Summers approaches the BRI initiative as a creatively repurposed version of this past. Despite the international media’s portrayal of the proposal as China’s bid for global hegemony, a significant dimension of BRI is domestic. With excess capacity at home, new avenues for sequestering Chinese capital need to be sought abroad. For Yunnan province in southwestern China, this has meant developing cooperation with its immediate neighbors. For example, Summer expects Chinese trade and investment in the Association of South East Asian Nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, to exceed its trade with the E.U. some time in the 2020s. In the northwest province of Xinjiang, greater economic development is also expected to mitigate extremism among China’s restive Uighur Muslim minority. Linking land-locked interior cities like Chongqing by rail with Central Asia has begun to address regional imbalances within China.

China is heavily exposed to the U.S. dollar, but now, with the risk of “decoupling,” Beijing is silently diversifying its reserves to reduce its dependence on the world’s largest reserve currency, analysts say.

Beijing will therefore manage its risk by diversifying its foreign exchange reserves into other currencies, ANZ predicted, as well as build up its “shadow reserves.”

“Diversifying its currency holdings, in a way is very much in line with the recent political moves of the Xi administration to focus on China’s trade relationships beyond just the United States. China and, more broadly, the Asian region is still highly exposed to movements in the US dollar,” Hsiao said.

The Chinese Communist Party has long claimed sovereignty over Taiwan and the right to take it by force if necessary.

"We don't have a need to declare ourselves an independent state,"

"We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan."

It was perhaps the most awaited economic moment of his presidency: the signing of a partial trade deal with China.So why, 30 minutes into his speech, was President Donald Trump expounding upon sneakers he found on eBay and questioning environmental concerns that prevent fireworks at Mount Rushmore?

Trump was eager to dismiss the impeachment saga as a "hoax" during his signing. As he vamped at length about the various players in the China deal's completion -- some more tangential than others -- the President seemed intent on seizing whatever spotlight was his before attention inevitably turned to the proceedings on the Hill.

Even as Trump touted what is undeniably a strong economy and a trade deal that eases for now the trade war he ignited, Democrats were insisting the President is unfit for office and must be removed. It's the contrast all but certain to underpin this year's presidential campaign, distilled into a 90-minute midday slice of Washington.

Cabinet secretaries and White House officials have predicted that President Trump’s initial trade agreement with China and his revised accord with Mexico and Canada — slated for final passage this week — will deliver twin jolts to the economy.

hope: Mr. Trump is up for re-election, and the economy appears to have grown by just over 2 percent in 2019, a dip from 2018 and well short of the administration’s forecasts of growth above 3 percent for the year.

Mr. Mnuchin said on Sunday that he expected the economy to grow between 2.5 percent and 3 percent this year,

He was not a particularly original thinker. More than a century before Wilson proposed the League of Nations, Tsar Alexander I of Russia had alarmed his fellow rulers at the Congress of Vienna by articulating a similar vision: an international system that would rest on a moral consensus upheld by a concert of powers that would operate from a shared set of ideas about legitimate sovereignty.

Wilson’s contribution was to synthesize those ideas into a concrete program for a rules-based order grounded in a set of international institutions. 

In the decades that followed, however, his ideas became an inspiration and a guide to national leaders, diplomats, activists, and intellectuals around the world.

Authorities in China are imposing new coronavirus restrictions near Beijing after a spate of recent outbreaks.

The Associated Press reports that the cities of Shijiazhuang and Xingtai, in the Hebei province, have issued seven-day stay-at-home orders after a week in which more than 300 people tested positive for the coronavirus.

These newest restrictions are drawing comparisons to the lockdown in Wuhan, which began last January, ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday. The city in Hubei province, which was the pandemic's first epicenter, closed its border and restricted movement for 76 days before new cases started to dwindle.

China’s relationship with the United States has reached a “new crossroads” and could get back on the right track following a period of “unprecedented difficulty”, senior diplomat Wang Yi said in official comments published on Saturday.

U.S. policies towards China had harmed the interests of both countries and brought huge dangers to the world.

The election of Joe Biden as U.S. President has been widely expected to improve relations between Washington and Beijing

ounting evidence shows that the Chinese Communist Party is running an extralegal campaign of mass internment of more than one million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other predominantly Muslim minorities in the western frontier province Xinjiang

Uighurs and other indigenous peoples are stripped of their traditions, culture, and language. China continues to deceive the world about the scale and depravity of this project but, by contrast with its mendacity regarding the coronavirus pandemic, it is not clear that it needs to do so: The world is not paying much attention.

This project has included the forced migration of millions of ethnic Han Chinese to settle this internal frontier. In the process, the Islamic way of life prevalent in the region has come under dire threat.

Deep in the lush mountain valleys of southern China lies the entrance to a mine shaft that once harbored bats with the closest known relative of the COVID-19 virus.

A bat research team visiting recently managed to take samples but had them confiscated

And a team of Associated Press journalists was tailed by plainclothes police in multiple cars who blocked access to roads and sites in late November.

Foreign direct investment in China largely held steady during the first half of this year, even as investment inflows into the U.S. and European Union plummeted, in a fresh sign that the world’s second-largest economy has suffered less damage from the pandemic.

the monthly average for new investments for the first half of the year was down almost half on the monthly average for the whole of 2019, the largest decline on record, the United Nations’s Conference on Trade and Development said Tuesday. But while foreign investment in the U.S. and European Union fell by 61% and 29% respectively, inflows to China were down by just 4%. China attracted foreign investment totaling $76 billion during the period, while the U.S. attracted $51 billion.

Unctad forecast that it would be the big loser, and expected global flows of investment to fall by 15% across 2020.

America’s failings — and, for that matter, Britain’s — were made all the more stark by successes elsewhere. “South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people — a tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in an essay for the London Review of Books that excoriated the Anglo-American handling of the crisis. “Other East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus.”

Its struggles may come to mark a historic inflection point: the moment the world’s preeminent superpower had to relinquish a certain vision of its own primacy as other countries — especially some rising powers in Asia — led the way.

“Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm,” wrote Mishra, pointing to both the United States’ punitively expensive health-care system and the hollowing out of Britain’s social services. “It has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.”