ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, the father of America’s nuclear bomb, described his country’s atomic rivalry with the Soviet Union as “two scorpions in a bottle”. The risks of this standoff have been contained over the years by various arms-control agreements, most recently New START. But that treaty expires on February 5th, with no replacement—and to make matters…
Europe made a “misjudgment” in categorising Russia as its top security threat and instead the continent’s real danger lay in Europeans’ inner “demon”, according to China’s longest-serving ambassador to the US. Cui Tiankai, a former Chinese foreign vice-minister, also claimed Nato had outlived its relevance and argued that the transatlantic security alliance no longer served…
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s designation of Washington-Beijing ties as “G2” carries a “deeply problematic” meaning that sidelines United States’ allies and partners in the region, a US lawmaker has stated in a letter. “This term carries deeply problematic connotations of depicting the United States and PRC [the People’s Republic of China] as coequal and…
A former French diplomat has urged Europe and China to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine, describing the issue as “the major challenge” facing the two sides. “The Ukraine war is fracturing the dialogue between two parts of the world,” Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, France’s ambassador to China between 2014 and 2017, said in an interview. “It shouldn’t…
In a high-stakes bilateral exchange where Taiwan has historically been an enduring flashpoint, the unusual silence was deafening. Last week’s summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump produced a rare omission – no mention of Taiwan at all in official readouts from both Washington and Beijing. The rare departure from diplomatic…
This year marks half a century of formal diplomatic relations between China and the European Union as well as the 25th anniversary of the founding of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. Here, Shi Jiangtao looks at how the relationship has been affected by Trump 2.0 and accompanying ups and downs of US-China…
Another high-stakes face-off between the United States and China has come and gone. The much-anticipated summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in Busan, South Korea, resulted in agreement on several points. The US agreed to reduce its so-called fentanyl tariffs on China by 10 per cent, suspend recently tightened technology…
China’s factory activity slump worsened in October, reaching its longest decline in more than nine years as a deepening economic slowdown sets in during the final quarter. The official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index was 49, versus 49.8 in September, the National Bureau of Statistics said Friday. The median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was…
China’s “institutional strength” will help the country tackle “major tests” over the course of the next five-year plan, analysts and state media have said. The country’s latest development plan, which is due to start next year and run until 2030, comes at a time when Beijing is facing increasing obstacles to its long-term ambitions both…
As China’s leadership meets this week to chart a policy course for the 15th five-year plan – China’s development blueprint for the rest of the decade – events that unfolded more than 70 years ago are echoing again. The growing external challenges of today have similarities to those the country faced in the 1950s –…