Category: The Diplomat

China’s State Council Decree No. 837 enters into force on July 1 as a regulation to promote “high-quality opening-up” and support the orderly global expansion of Chinese capital. Chinese companies investing abroad will face closer state control over which technology they can transfer, who they can send to implement it, and how much know-how they can share.  Since it only affects Chinese companies, Decree No. 837 initially received less global attention than the two State Council decrees that predated it. Decree No. 834 on supply chain security and Decree No.…

The Dong people in China are an Indigenous ethnic group who are known to have lived in the mountainous regions of southwestern China for about 600 years. They don’t have a written language – instead their cultural knowledge is shared by word of mouth. This means that the outside world doesn’t know much about them. But an ambitious university-led research project to document the Dong people’s distinctive architecture is revealing a great deal about this marginalized Indigenous group’s way of life. There are an estimated 3 million Dong people living…

On June 17, U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian signed an interim deal to end the war, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the oil sanctions that had crippled Iran’s economy. As the Iran war moves into the final stages of negotiation, the episode has surfaced the strategic calculations of every actor drawn into it. Those calculations carry consequences well beyond the Middle East, reshaping diplomatic relationships and the terms on which governments choose to align.  For China, its Middle East strategy has now narrowed to…

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) recent campaign to strengthen a “correct view of performance” (政绩观) represents a structural recalibration of China’s governance framework beyond mere ideological exercises. Launched in February and expected to continue till July, the initiative acknowledges that the metrics that underpinned political legitimacy over the past four decades – particularly rapid GDP growth and infrastructural expansion – are no longer sufficient to sustain political legitimacy amid an economic slowdown, fiscal constraints, and rising societal expectations. In response, the CCP is attempting to redefine what counts as bureaucratic success, shifting from a narrow, quantitative conception to a model…

Xi Jinping’s astounding purge of the senior leadership of the military is well documented, but another purge within the Chinese Communist Party has drawn less attention. Xi Jinping has ruthlessly gone after former Politburo Standing Committee member and one-time economic czar Wang Qishan.  Xi has not charged Wang with any crime, but the latter lives under virtual house arrest in Beijing. Wang has not been referenced in the Chinese official media since October 2023. But, perhaps just as important, Xi has systematically purged Wang’s patronage network, which he built over…

When EU leaders gathered in Brussels on June 18-19, their agenda was packed with the bloc’s long-term budget, regional conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and global trade frictions. Although China was not explicitly named in the final European Council conclusions, the leaders’ discussions on “global macroeconomic imbalances” probably referred to the bloc’s fraught economic ties with Beijing. The summit yielded an ambivalent mandate. EU leaders called on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to maintain dialogue with key economic counterparts, while simultaneously urging an evaluation of the…

“A close neighbor is better than a distant relative,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Nepali counterpart Shisir Khanal during their recent meeting in Beijing. Although Wang named no country, given the context in which he made the statement, the top Chinese diplomat could not have been more direct: he was talking about China (the “close neighbor”) and the U.S. (the “distant relative”). The Nepali foreign minister was in Beijing to reassure the Chinese that Nepali soil would not be used for anti-China activities. In recent times, Chinese officials…

The Tibet Aid Program (TAP), also known as Pairing up Assistance for Tibet (对口援藏) for China’s Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) was officially launched following the Third National Tibet Work Forum in 1994. Originally it was designed to boost the TAR’s economy, with wealthy provinces from China’s eastern regions funding the new roads, buildings, and power grids. Eventually the program started to include other sectors such as healthcare and education.  Under Xi Jinping, the focus emphasized assertion of soft power with infrastructure developments. This transaction moved the program from simple economic…

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has decided some fundamental tenets of Christianity mark the world’s largest faith as a cult, and one that needs vigorous suppression. That includes sentencing a 77-year-old man to jail, in part, for helping young Christians find spouses and believing that faith in Jesus gets people into heaven. According to the CCP, these were the “heretical” activities of a “cult.” Pastor Yang Zhijin was sentenced to three years in prison, along with 30 of his congregants, for “using a cult organization to undermine the implementation of…

El Salvador has undergone an impressive, yet dystopian, transformation under President Nayib Bukele. Just a few years ago, the historical district was a gang-ridden labyrinth of crumbling structures and dirty market stalls. It is now a glistening tourist mecca of safe pedestrian streets, posh shops and restaurants, and whitewashed civic buildings. At its center is a massive Chinese-built public library, a sprawling glass structure, illuminated at night like a Christmas tree, overshadowing the adjacent Presidential Palace. During June 2026, the author was in El Salvador, as a guest of the…