China Archive

As part of the same 13th National People’s Congress that abolished his term limits, Chinese President Xi Jinping oversaw a significant Cabinet reshuffle earlier this month. The State Council, the chief executive body of the Chinese government, now includes a Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which early press reports, from both the Chinese and international media, rendered as the Ministry of Ecological Environment. The ministry will be led by Li Ganjie, who has since June 2017 served as the minister for environmental protection. Its broad portfolio includes what had been under the purview of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, as […]

It is revealing of current American political obsessions that a recent book about the Marshall Plan’s relationship to the Cold War might be seen first and foremost as having lessons for today’s troubled ties between the United States and Russia. In that book, Benn Steil, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that with the Marshall Plan’s launch in 1947, the U.S. and the Soviet Union “became irrevocably committed to securing their respective spheres of influence.” Yet despite widespread concern about Russia, the most consequential great power struggle today is the one between the U.S. and China. […]

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an order imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The tariffs, which will go into effect in 15 days, exempt Canada and Mexico for now, with the possibility of other states to be exempted as well. Combined with the resignation earlier this week of Gary Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser who had been seen as a check on Trump’s protectionist instincts during his tenure as director of the National Economic Council, they signal that Trump is ready to make good on campaign promises of getting tough on trade—and in particular with China. […]

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner—both former senior officials in the Obama administration—noted that over the past 45 years, “neither carrots nor sticks have swayed China as predicted.” From Richard Nixon on, American presidents believed that U.S. diplomacy and military power could “persuade Beijing that it was neither possible nor necessary to challenge the U.S.-led security order in Asia.” But that didn’t prove true. Today, as Campbell and Ratner note, “China is on the path to becoming a military peer the likes of which the United States has not seen since the Soviet Union” […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss what Chinese President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power could mean for U.S.-China ties. For the Report, Tim Ferry talks with Peter Dörrie about a little-covered angle of the increasingly bitter diplomatic sparring between Taiwan and China: Taiwanese telecom scammers who have fanned out across the world to avoid detection, but often find themselves extradited back to mainland China, and more severe punishment, when they are arrested. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read […]