South East Asia

Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping agreed in a video call on Wednesday: Russia and China should stand firm in rejecting Western interference and defending each other’s security interests. The two presidents’ conversation, eight days after Putin spoke to U.S. President Joe Biden in a similar format, underscored how U.S.-Europe …

It started in 2009; the financial crisis that hit the world a year earlier was storming through the Balkans, and the region was scraping the bottom of the barrel to make ends meet. Enter China. Greece opened its door through the Port of Piraeus, while Serbia declared China the ‘fourth …

BIRN’s new interactive map pinpoints China’s growing business presence in the region – which experts say media and civil society need to focus on more. Experts and journalists have warned that Chinese loans and investments in the Balkans lack a desirable level of transparency and say more of a focus …

China is exploring the possibility of building its first military base on the Atlantic ocean, according to classified intelligence reports viewed by the Wall Street Journal. The proposed host for the military base is Equatorial Guinea, a small central African country of approximately 1.4 million people. Politically, Equatorial Guinea is …

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping met Wednesday via video conference, stressing their strong alliance amid both countries’ deteriorating relations with the west. “A new model of cooperation has been formed between our countries, based, among other things, on such principles as non-interference in internal affairs, …

The United States is getting serious about the threat of war with China. The U.S. Department of Defense has labeled China its primary adversary, civilian leaders have directed the military to develop credible plans to defend Taiwan, and President Joe Biden has strongly implied that the United States would not …

On 15 November 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden held their first virtual meeting. According to the White House’s readout, Biden told Xi that the two countries should establish ‘common sense guardrails to ensure that US–China competition does not veer into conflict and to keep lines …

Until very recently, the hefty monetary and fiscal relaxation unleashed by governments to stimulate the economic recovery at the onset of the global financial crisis has not had major inflationary repercussions, in particular as the main benchmark has been the benign consumer price inflation, rather than the rapidly growing real-estate …

The Taliban takeover has decimated the gains of the past twenty years achieved by Afghans—against tremendous odds—in the spaces of education, women’s rights, and civil society engagement. With no embassy and no forward presence on the ground in Afghanistan, Washington’s leverage to impact events has been significantly reduced. Among a …

The European Union (EU) has begun to think more creatively about initiatives that can challenge China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including the recently launched “Global Gateway” project. Since its official launch in 2013, China’s BRI— Chairman Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative—has come under criticism from the West and …