China Archive

NAIROBI, Kenya — The African Union has released a blueprint designed to guide the continent in its relations with “emerging powers” like China, Brazil and India. A task force formed by the union says Africa must have a strategy for engaging these countries to avoid a “second colonization” and to make sure Africa benefits as much as possible from its relations with them. The strategic plan, completed Sept. 13 at a meeting of the AU “Task Force on Africa’s Strategic Partnership with the Emerging Powers” in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, assesses how cooperation with emerging powers can help Africa use her […]

Europe’s new concerns about reliance on Russia for much of its energy security are nothing compared with the worries in many other capitals around the world about the problem posed by China’s growing demand for oil and gas, say analysts. Those worries are little mollified by repeated assurances coming out of Beijing that China’s insatiable appetite for energy is not a threat to the rest of the world. Beijing’s assurances don’t sound convincing, many analysts say. Each year since the early 1990s, China has been consuming more and more energy to fuel its fast-growing economy. Last year, the Chinese accounted […]

It was raining in Beijing the morning of Oct. 8 as new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe flew to the city on his maiden official trip to China. As his aircraft touched down in the Chinese capital, the rain stopped and the sky began to clear, a phenomenon cited by both Abe and the Chinese media as a sign that Sino-Japanese ties were slowly but surely on the mend. An editorial in the China Daily, the country’s national English-language newspaper, said the break in the rain illustrated “optimism in the long-strained ties between China and Japan” and urged the two […]

Last February wasn’t a good month for Terry Semel. Not only was the Yahoo! Chairman and CEO in the middle of an ambitious overseas expansion project, but his web search company had been called before Congress to testify about its involvement in a high-profile international incident. Bad news for any businessman, but for U.S. foreign policy it was a sudden and unsettling introduction to the reach of the information age. The trouble for Yahoo started with the jailing of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist who had been convicted of “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities” after an email he […]

HONG KONG — The arrest of the most high-profile public figure in China in a decade may be a shocking example of endemic corruption in the world’s biggest out-of-control economy, but the question on the lips of some financial investigators in the West is: Will the trail of Chen Liangyu’s ill-gotten loot lead to the United States? The shadow economy in China, a combination of embezzlement, bribery, tax avoidance and underground banking of both legal and illegal money, is huge, and growing. Much of this money is laundered abroad, mostly via Hong Kong, say investigators, and there is growing evidence […]

BAMAKO, Mali — Lambert Coulibaly, 40, seems an unlikely proponent of the global marketplace. Employed as a maintenance worker by a hotel in the River Quarter of Mali’s capital, he spends not a little of his day sitting around and smoking. Yet Coulibaly commutes to his job each day on a Chinese-made Yamaha motorcycle. As he travels around Bamako, he is joined by tens of thousands of Malians on motorcycles and mopeds, the majority of which are also Chinese. “The Chinese motorcycles are cheaper. Plus the Japanese are more expensive,” Coulibaly said. He said his Chinese-made Yamaha cost about $620. […]