Zambian President Edgar Lungu shakes hands with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, Sept. 1, 2018 (pool photo by Nicolas Asfouri via AP).

With its economy in trouble from a high public debt burden as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, Zambia’s government recently suspended interest payments on some sovereign bonds. The country is already in arrears on some of its debt—including $183 million in official bilateral loans from other countries and $256 million from commercial banks—and has asked for a six-month suspension on interest payments from the holders of its $3 billion in Eurobonds, which are denominated in foreign currencies. These bondholders are due to make a final decision on Zambia’s request in mid-November, but a substantial portion of them have so far […]

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, right, walks near the Monument to the People’s Heroes during a ceremony to mark Martyr’s Day at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Sept. 30, 2020 (AP photo by Ng Han Guan).

When the world first started learning about the outbreak of a dangerously contagious new respiratory virus in the city of Wuhan, in central China, the Chinese government was defensive and secretive about it. Many foreign commentators were quick to cast China’s reaction as a metaphor for the inherent weaknesses of an authoritarian system. Under the constantly tightening grip of its power-monopolizing leader, Xi Jinping, we were told, bad news has had an increasingly hard time traveling from China’s provinces to the capital in Beijing, and from there, into the higher echelons of the chain of command in the Communist Party. […]

Surveillance cameras near the portrait of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong at the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, March 15, 2019 (AP photo by Andy Wong).

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Subscribers can adjust their newsletter settings to receive China Note by email every week. Last week, China’s National People’s Congress released the first draft of the Personal Information Protection Law, which would set up the first dedicated system to protect privacy and personal data in China. Having been in the works for well over a decade, it has been a wait. Personal information in China has been governed by a patchwork of regulations; some scholars […]

President Donald Trump arrives to speak about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Families Food Box Program, at Flavor First Growers and Packers in Mills River, N.C., Aug. 24, 2020 (AP photo by Nell Redmond).

President Donald Trump still just doesn’t get tariffs. On the campaign trail in Wisconsin recently, Trump again bragged—wrongly—about how China is paying for the higher taxes he slapped on imports over the past two years. He then touted the $28 billion in ad hoc payments that the federal government has doled out to farmers in that time to compensate for the hit they took when China retaliated against U.S. exports. What Trump doesn’t say is that it is American consumers and taxpayers who are footing the bill for his failed trade wars. Analysts project that American farmers will receive a […]

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks about the coronavirus at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., Oct. 23, 2020 (AP photo by Andrew Harnik).

Should Joe Biden win the American presidency on Nov. 3, the world will experience whiplash, as the United States performs a second about-face in its posture toward multilateralism in only four years. Although the U.S. has oscillated through cycles of internationalism and isolationism before, it has never executed such a swift and dramatic double-reverse. A Biden triumph would repudiate the “America First” platform on which Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, and the hyper-nationalist, unilateralist and sovereigntist mindset that undergirds it. Such a stunning shift in America’s global orientation would have major implications for global cooperation on everything […]

Delegates wait for the start of the opening session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, May 21, 2020 (AP photo by Andy Wong).

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Following shutdowns of factories and lockdowns due to COVID-19, China’s economy shrank by 6.8 percent in the first three months of this year compared to 2019—its first economic contraction on record since 1976. But in the months since then, China seems to have bucked the trend of pandemic slumps hitting other countries, as it posted 4.9 percent year-on-year growth in the third quarter, according to data released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. China’s […]

A firefighter watches the LNU Lightning Complex fires spread through the Berryessa Estates neighborhood of unincorporated Napa County, Calif., Aug. 21, 2020 (AP photo by Noah Berger).

As if COVID-19 were not enough to worry about, the global climate crisis is driving a “staggering rise” in natural disasters, the United Nations detailed last week in a new report, “The Human Cost of Disasters.” According to the U.N.’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, known as UNDRR, the number of natural disasters was 75 percent higher between 2000 and 2019 than in the previous 20 years. Unless humanity takes prompt, dramatic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet risks becoming “an uninhabitable hell for millions of people,” the report’s authors warn. Unfortunately, the world is not doing nearly […]

Students attend a ceremony to kick off the new semester at Wuhan High School, Wuhan, China, Sept. 1, 2020 (Chinatopix photo via AP Images).

Earlier this year, as the coronavirus seemed to abruptly explode out of China and engulf the globe, Chinese authorities launched a propaganda campaign to try to turn the pandemic into a political win for Beijing. Months later, as governments around the world still struggle to contain COVID-19, with new waves and spikes from India to Europe to the United States, the time has come to take a tally of China’s efforts. The results are stark, showing some gains for the Chinese regime but also some major failures in the one area where Beijing had hoped to leverage the pandemic to […]

A man walks by a money exchange shop decorated with Chinese yuan banknotes and other countries currency banknotes, in Hong Kong, Aug. 6, 2019 (AP photo by Kin Cheung).

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. In a further round of sanctions last week, the U.S. blacklisted virtually all of Iran’s financial sector. Perhaps in anticipation, Iran’s central bank announced that it had adopted the yuan, also known as the renminbi, as its main foreign reserve currency, replacing the U.S. dollar. With a 25-year strategic partnership with China under discussion, Iran will have a guaranteed market for its oil and gas exports, and with renminbi reserves, it will be able to […]

Sweden’s then-foreign minister, Carl Bildt, at a press briefing in Berlin, Germany, Jan. 8, 2014 (AP photo by Markus Schreiber).

“On foreign and defense policy, absolutely, there is an ambition to be more united, and that vision is shared by all of the member countries,” says Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, about the European Union. “Then in practice, as you’ve seen, there are divergences, and they are more or less clear in different areas.” Those divergences have frustrated advocates of a more forceful EU that operates on the world stage with “strategic autonomy,” a phrase Mr. Bildt finds “confuses more than it clarifies.” But he adds, as someone who has “been watching these things for a […]

Sweden's then-foreign minister, Carl Bildt, during a press conference in Kiev, Ukraine, March 5, 2014 (AP photo by Efrem Lukatsky).

Strategic autonomy has long been a recurring refrain for advocates of a more forceful European Union on the global stage. Upon taking office in December 2019, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that hers would be a “geopolitical commission.” The sense of urgency has only grown since then. Ongoing tensions with Russia over its role in Eastern Europe and new ones with Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean have called attention to the threats the EU faces in its own neighborhood. Managing strained ties with the United States and defining the new terms of relations with the post-Brexit United […]

A TV screen shows Chinese Trade Minister Zhong Shan speaking during a virtual meeting with his counterparts from Japan, South Korea and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Jun. 4, 2020 (AP photo by Hau Dinh).

Southeast Asia has always played a key role in Chinese foreign policy, but its strategic and economic importance has increased further in recent years, given the heightened economic and political tensions between Beijing and Washington. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations accounted for nearly 15 percent of China’s imports and exports during the first half of this year, more than the United States or the European Union. For Southeast Asia, too, China is a key commercial partner, second only to Japan as a source of foreign investment in the region. Yet, as Sebastian Strangio writes in his new book, “In […]

The Dave Johnson coal-fired power plant in Glenrock, Wyoming, July 27, 2018 (AP photo by J. David Ake).

All the interruptions, taunts and empty bombast from President Donald Trump during his first debate with Joe Biden left little room for actual discussion of major issues, from the coronavirus pandemic to U.S. foreign policy. Lost especially amid all the noise was climate change, which looms as an existential threat to life in this century. Climate change was only briefly mentioned in last month’s debate, when it was peculiarly framed. For a challenge this important, the battle lines were oddly drawn around questions of extremism. Trump, as unserious as ever, boasted vaguely about the quality of America’s “beautiful” and “crystal […]

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, center back, attends the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers’ meeting on the novel coronavirus in Vientiane, Laos, Feb. 20, 2020 (AP photo by Sakchai Lalit).

With every major religion in the world represented, and political systems that range from relatively open democracies to authoritarian one-party states, Southeast Asia is one of the most spectacularly diverse regions in the world. It stretches from the highlands of northern Myanmar to the beaches of southern Thailand and the Philippines, and includes low-income economies like Laos and Cambodia, as well as Singapore, one of the wealthiest places in the world on a per capita basis. Each of the 11 countries in this multifarious region, though, face a common foreign policy challenge: how to deal with the political and economic […]

Workers dig at a rare earth mine in Ganxian county in central China, Dec. 30, 2010 (Chinatopix photo via AP Images).

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The world is in little danger of running out of rare earth minerals, despite their name. They are neither hard to find, nor difficult to mine. But they are in demand, since they are used in components of popular high-tech devices like smartphones, as well as electric cars, wind turbines and even military hardware. Although researchers found a huge trove of rare earth metals in Japanese waters two years ago—enough to supply the world on […]

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcome ceremony in Beijing, April 1, 2019 (AP photo by Andy Wong).

Political scientist Ian Bremmer remarked in a Twitter post in July that the relationship between the United States and China has “way too much (mostly economic) interdependence” for there to be a new Cold War. Instead, he posited, “It’s a failed marriage with the family still living together. How the kids turn out is an open question.” The “kids” in this analogy are the small and mid-sized open economies of the Asia-Pacific—countries that depend as much on the U.S. for technology and national security as they do on China to buy their exports. A prime example is New Zealand, which […]