China Note Archive

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]