Mar 08, 2022

China’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine has been heavily scrutinized and criticized. While Chinese officials have expressed concern about civilian casualties, they have declined to condemn the attack, which they regard as a response to NATO expansion, and they have declared that they will not join the West in imposing financial sanctions on Russia. Yet China has hardly given full-throated support to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The question is whether this relatively neutral stance by China could prove crucial to preventing further dangerous military escalation.

May 27, 2019

Critics often claim that China is using its massive “Belt and Road Initiative” as a form of coercive “debt-trap diplomacy” to exert control over the countries that join its transnational infrastructure investment scheme. This risk, as Deborah Brautigam of John Hopkins University recently noted, is often exaggerated by the media. In fact, the BRI may hold a different kind of risk – for China itself.

Sep 25, 2017

North Korea is one of the most insular countries in the world. That insularity is a curse for the long-suffering North Korean people, but an advantage for a sanction-based strategy, because only one country is needed to make it work: China.