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Observers frequently contend that China’s international influence is growing in lockstep with its economic rise. This includes the US Department of State, which recently suggested that after four decades of rapid growth, China’s ‘global reach and international influence have expanded accordingly’ (Office of the Secretary of State 2020: 40). While scholars in international relations and other fields have been more cautious, policy and popular debates have shed nuance in favour of a linear narrative that pegs China’s influence to its global investments (Goh 2016; Kastner and Pearson 2021).

Global China Pulse (GCP) is an open access biannual publication that focuses on China’s international engagements in their various manifestations. Alongside the informational infrastructure The People’s Map of Global China provides, GCP offers a new space to publish content in a variety of styles and, possibly, experiment with different approaches and formats. GCP rests on two pillars: the conviction that today more than ever it is necessary to bridge the gap between the scholarly community, civil society, and the general public; and the related belief that…

On an August day last year, Xi Jinping visited Saihanba National Forest Park to inspect the trees and flowers.  Spanning nearly 200,000 acres northwest of Beijing, the old imperial hunting ground turned to desert in the 19th century amidst deforestation and overuse. With no trees left to catch the wind, violent sandstorms rolled in from Inner Mongolia, filling Beijing’s air with choking sediment. But in 1962, Chinese authorities began a multi-decade project to restore the region into a “Great Green Wall” defending the capital.  More in this series: The Diplomatic Deadlock It worked…

Abe personally strengthened India’s bilateral relationship with Japan by enticing India, a notoriously reluctant and cautious actor in global politics, to join his vision of the Indo-Pacific.

Shortly after the shocking news of the assassination of Japanese former prime minister, Abe Shinzo, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the following day, July 9, would be a day of national mourning in India for the slain leader. The show of respect was an appropriate statement for the loss of Abe, who was a transformative figure in Japan-India relations. Abe strengthened India’s bilateral…

In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union tried to induce North Korea to drift away from China. This challenged China’s security, given escalated tension between China and the Soviet Union in this period. To counter the Soviet policies, China used binding strategies, which are a state’s attempt to maintain or enhance its alignment with its security partners. I argue that China chose coercive binding as its primary strategy because it had strong leverage over North Korea. Meanwhile, China deployed accommodative binding to complement its primary strategy. In this article, I first develop a theoretical…

The governance of the vast resources of the Solar System will be constrained by the nature and distribution of those resources. We outline these constraints for the Moon, Mars, and the Asteroids. Governance is also historically contingent, and the “Founder Effect” means that our actions in the first few decades of harnessing space resources, mostly on the Moon and the near-Earth asteroids, will have a strong influence on the very different circumstances that will obtain later as our space-based economy grows. We review the nascent efforts to put in place principles and concepts for space resource…

America’s recent turn toward protectionism has raised concerns about the future viability of the liberal international trading system. This study examines how and why public attitudes toward international trade change when one’s country is targeted by protectionist measures from abroad. To address this question, we fielded three original survey experiments in the country most affected by US protectionism: China. First, we find consistent evidence that US protectionism reduces Chinese citizens’ support for trade. This finding is replicated in parallel experiments on technology cooperation,…

What explains rising powers’ approach to emerging norms that challenge ontological order? The article uses a controlled comparison of two rising powers, China and India, as they address the responsibility to protect, which reconceives state sovereignty as contingent. Both states rejected the norm at its inception, before diverging as UN Security Council members during norm application in the Libya intervention. China assumed a creative resister role, offering tactical concessions, while using traditional sovereignty norms to renovate norm content. India assumed a norm begrudger role, typified…

Awardees 2022: Awarded to Yeling Tan for her book Disaggregating China, Inc. State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order, Cornell University Press (2021).

Yeling Tan’s Disaggregating China, Inc. makes a major contribution to the fields of international political economy, comparative political economy, and Chinese politics. The book investigates China’s responses to pressures for reform arising from its entry into the World Trade Organization at the end of 2001. Tan convincingly shows that such pressures did not simply call for China to make policy adjustments…

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched two important connectivity initiatives: An economic silk road and a maritime silk road. The idea behind both was to create a network of connectivity between China and mostly developing countries that would boost both mutual collaboration and prosperity. These two initiatives were the foundation of what would come to be termed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a gargantuan infrastructure, trade, and connectivity venture encompassing billions of dollars of Chinese investment in projects across the globe. 

Since its inception, BRI has generated…

The past two decades have witnessed increasing scholarly analysis of China’s growing presence in Africa. How does African agency operate within the asymmetric power relations between China and African states? How do African actors use foreign-sponsored projects to achieve domestic objectives? Some analyses take a China-centered perspective, with divergent views about how Chinese economic engagement promotes or inhibits African development. Scholarly work increasingly recognizes the agency of African actors. I advance upon the African agency argument by proposing a concept of presidential…

The 13th BRICS Summit, featuring the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, took place virtually earlier this month. It was chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the leaders of the other BRICS members—Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa—all tuned in. Modi’s speech was avidly covered by the Indian press, and the summit itself drew significant coverage by newspapers in India and China, the two most populous BRICS members.

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Since President Xi announced China’s grand strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, in Kazakhstan in 2013, it has grown so much in geographic and conceptual scope that it has become difficult to measure. Agreements setting out some form of formal affiliation with the initiative have been signed with 146 countries. Meanwhile, the projects covered by this grand strategy have increased in number but also in terms of sectoral and geographic complexity, from the Arctic to the deep oceans, from Latin America to outer space. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has been a major complication for the…

China’s outward investments are likely to have a substantial impact on global sustainability. Through capital, technology, and standards, China’s investments, including through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), have the potential to act as catalysts for sustainable, climate-conscious development—or to accelerate resource depletion, pollution, biodiversity loss, and carbon-intensive resource depletion. This policy paper draws from several pieces of research analyzing the political economy of China’s outward investments and consequent environmental impacts. Findings from these analyses…

This book provides a timely, critical, and thought-provoking analysis of the implications of the disruption of COVID-19 to the foreign aid and development system, and the extent to which the system is retaining a level of relevance, legitimacy or coherence.

Drawing on the expertise of key scholars from around the world in the fields of international development, political science, socioeconomics, history, and international relations, the book explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on development aid within an environment of shifting national and regional priorities and interactions. The…