Advertisement Conventional accounts frame China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through a geopolitical lens. In this context, the BRI is perceived as being formulated and implemented in a top-down process, whereby Beijing selects, finances, and constructs projects along the official economic corridors. Consequently, participant countries lack any real agency. However, evidence suggests that this framing is flawed on both accounts. First, the BRI combines bottom-up and top-down approaches to policy formulation and implementation since its foundations can be traced to provincial level initiatives. Therefore, its geopolitical dimension is incidental to…
Month: April 2022
Your Thursday Briefing: Russia Cuts Gas Supplies
Good morning. A gas crisis looms over Europe, anger grows in Shanghai and Singapore executes an intellectually disabled man. Russia cuts gas supplies to Europe In its toughest response yet to European sanctions, Russia halted natural gas shipments to Bulgaria and Poland. The E.U.’s top official denounced the move as “blackmail,” but European officials said they were prepared to weather the near-term impact: Poland’s gas storage facilities are 75 percent full, and it has been working for years to avoid being held to ransom by Moscow over energy. Germany also…
China cracks down on price gouging amid food shortages
Chinese authorities have said they are cracking down on price gouging as food shortages due to Shanghai’s lockdown continue and fears in Beijing prompt a run on supermarkets. It comes as social media platforms shut down the account of a high-profile critic of the government’s insistence on a traditional Chinese medicine product being rolled out to millions of residents. On Wednesday, the Ministry of Public Security pledged any individuals taking advantage of outbreaks to make a profit would be dealt with strictly, with fines of up to 3m yuan (£363,400).…
Risk of recession in Europe, US and China is rising by the day | Kenneth Rogoff
Is the global economy flying into a perfect storm, with Europe, China, and the US all entering downturns at the same time later this year? The risks of a global recession trifecta are rising by the day. A recession in Europe is almost inevitable if the war in Ukraine escalates, and Germany, which has been fiercely resisting calls to pull the plug on Russian oil and gas, finally relents. China is finding it increasingly difficult to sustain positive growth in the face of draconian Covid-19 lockdowns, which have already brought…
Beijing’s Testing Surge
Beijing’s testing surge Beijing is racing to test nearly all of its 22 million residents three times over five days in a high-stakes bid to avoid a similar fate as Shanghai, where millions of residents have been forced into an almost unbearable monthlong lockdown. Today millions of Beijing residents took their second round of tests, and officials from the Chinese capital announced that they had uncovered an additional 46 cases. The city identified three more neighborhoods today as high-risk and four more as medium-risk, designations that both prompt lockdowns. Overall,…
China Maritime Report No. 20: The PLA Army Amphibious Force
The PLA Army’s (PLAA) amphibious units would serve as the core of any joint force charged with invading Taiwan. As a result of the 2017 reforms, the PLAA now possesses six amphibious combined arms brigades distributed across three group armies (the 72nd, 73rd, and 74th). During a cross-strait invasion, these brigades would likely receive support from other elements of the group armies to which they belong. This could include fire support, air defense, air transport, aerial fire support, and electronic warfare/cyber-attack. CMSI China Maritime Reports
Labor ‘gravely concerned’ by Karen Andrews’ claim about potential China election interference
Labor has raised grave concerns about the home affairs minister’s use of “privileged access to intelligence reporting”, after Karen Andrews publicly alluded to a potential attempt by China at interference in the federal election. The shadow minister, Kristina Keneally, has written to Andrews to remind her of “the vital convention that opposition is briefed on any developing matters of national security” during the election caretaker mode. The letter, seen by Guardian Australia, was sent after Andrews implied China might have timed the announcement of a security deal with Solomon Islands…
Beijing Has 138 Covid Cases. It Musters 139,000 Workers to Test Residents.
BEIJING — Shanghai appeared on Wednesday to be making gradual progress in bringing coronavirus outbreaks under control, while Beijing continued finding more cases as it tries to test three times over five days nearly all of the capital’s 22 million residents. Shanghai announced its lowest total for new cases in weeks: 12,309. Only 171 of those were detected among people still in the broader community. The rest were among people already in isolation as the contacts of previously infected people, and were less likely to infect others, according to municipal…
China claims Beijing is the true test of its pandemic policy
Apr 27th 2022 BEIJING IF CHINA’S PUBLIC-HEALTH policies were decided by the people of Shanghai, the country would abandon the “zero-covid” strategy, which uses mass testing and strict lockdowns to crush the virus. The city’s 25m residents, among whom are some of China’s richest and most influential people, have complained loudly about the grim weeks-long lockdown they have endured. But Beijing is where China’s covid strategy is devised—and the mood is quite different in the capital. A brief flurry of panic-buying notwithstanding, Beijing’s 22m residents responded with a mixture of…
Your Wednesday Briefing: Beijing’s Mass Testing Plan
Good morning. We’re covering Beijing’s scramble to quash the Omicron variant, Germany’s pivot to supplying Ukraine with heavy weaponry and a brownface controversy roiling Hong Kong. Mass testing in Beijing Faced with a growing number of coronavirus infections across Beijing, city officials are trying to test most of the Chinese capital’s 22 million residents in the hope of avoiding the pain of imposing a citywide lockdown like in Shanghai. Beijing is ordering mass testing across the city more quickly than in Shanghai, where officials started testing on a similar scale…