Maritime Issues Archive

Editor’s note: Every Wednesday, WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor, Benjamin Wilhelm, curates the top news and analysis from China written by the experts who follow it. Chinese internet and e-commerce goliath Alibaba announced on Monday that Jack Ma, its founder and chairman of the board, will step down next September. Ma, who was an English teacher when he launched Alibaba with 17 of his students and friends, has become one of China’s most famous entrepreneurs and its richest. Ma’s replacement will be Daniel Zhang, who became CEO in 2013 as part of what Ma said was a long-planned succession. Zhang’s […]

In the largest Russian military exercise since the height of the Cold War, Moscow this week is deploying 300,000 troops, 900 tanks and 1,000 aircraft in central and eastern Russia. The military demonstration, called “Vostok 2018,” or East Exercise 2018, is expected to last from Sept. 11 to 15. This year, for the first time ever, Chinese military forces will participate, sending 3,200 troops and 30 aircraft over the border into eastern Russia. Similar Cold War-era drills only included states that were part of the Soviet sphere. The Vostok exercise highlights two important, seemingly contradictory things about the relationship between […]

French and British fishing vessels clashed at sea last month, marking an escalation in an ongoing dispute over scallop stocks in the English Channel. French fishermen are prohibited from dredging the shellfish during the summer months in order to prevent overfishing, while their British competitors fish year-round, leading the French to accuse the British of depleting stocks. Negotiators from the two countries failed to finalize a resolution to the impasse last week. According to Johan Bergenas, senior director for public policy at Vulcan, this skirmish is only part of a growing global conflict over increasingly scarce fish stocks and fishery […]