The US will remain focused on containing China in the Indo-Pacific, despite short-term deployment distractions caused by its direct involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, according to analysts. Before the strikes, the United States had repositioned forces for the conflict, including shifting assets away from the Indo-Pacific. Last week, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz cancelled a…
China’s political system – where state power and social control are dominated by the ruling Communist Party – could give Beijing an edge in a new trade war with the United States compared with other countries, experts and insiders have said. But they warned that Chinese companies and local governments may lack the creativity to…
“A very good friend of mine” was how US President Donald Trump described Chinese President Xi Jinping during his election campaign last year. Then, in the days after taking office in January, Trump said he “always liked” Xi, and that they “always had a very good relationship”. This month, Trump again hailed his “very good…
The shake-up of the US military leadership is unlikely to change the Trump administration’s strategic focus on China but will leave it with less experience of the region at the top, according to observers. US President Donald Trump dismissed six senior military officers on Friday, including Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Charles Brown, the…
A Chinese professor has sparked a public backlash after he asked a visiting Kazakh diplomat how to make Chinese women “have children obediently, early and in large numbers” at a think tank event. Wang Xianju, a professor at Renmin University and a former counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Belarus, was speaking to Erlan Qarin,…
Competition between the United States and China appears inevitable, but the result of next week’s presidential election will determine whether Washington’s tactics are “coarse” or “refined”, a leading academic has said. Vice-President Kamala Harris has a better chance of winning the election, Jin Canrong, vice dean of the school of international studies at Renmin University,…
The double crunch could still be avoided but conditions were only to get tougher for Beijing, according to analysts. A top rate of 35.3 per cent will apply to EVs from Chinese-state owned SAIC Motor and its subsidiaries, on top of a baseline 10 per cent duty that applies to all EV imports, which by…
The US is upping the ante in its information war with China, with the House of Representatives backing a bill to spend US$1.6 billion within five years to promote anti-China propaganda, according to observers. The “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund Authorisation Act of 2023” was passed 351-36 earlier this month and will require Senate…