China’s rapidly aging population presents a huge challenge for the country as it needs to find new ways to pay for rising healthcare and social welfare benefits. And that’s where Africa may be able to help. Home to one of the youngest populations on the planet, young African workers might be able to help resolve the problem of China’s shrinking labor pool.
This Friday, April 27, the South Korean and North Korean leaders will meet in the demilitarized zone dividing their estranged countries to discuss improving relations and possibly even formally ending the Korean War, which has continued in the form of an often tense and fragile armistice since the cessation of combat in 1953. This inter-Korean summit, the first since 2007, signifies closer ties between the two Koreas—and will be an important bellwether for Donald Trump’s late-May or early-June meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. It will also be watched closely by North Korea’s neighbor China, which has long stood as Pyongyang’s most important ally and played the role of gatekeeper for its relations with the rest of the world. While China’s Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping’s meeting in March with Kim seemed to have fortified the recently-strained Beijing-Pyongyang relationship, it’s unclear whether Kim’s apparent diplomatic openings are to Beijing’s advantage.
Joseph Bosco served as China Country Desk Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (2005-2006) and Director of Asia-Pacific Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Affairs (2008-2010).
He is presently a Fellow at the Institute for Corea-America Studies (ICAS) and the Institute for Taiwan-America Studies (ITAS). He was formerly a nonresident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a nonresident Senior Fellow in the Asia-Pacific program at the Atlantic Council and part of its international observer delegation during Taiwan’s historic 2000 presidential election (where political power was first transferred peacefully in a Chinese/Taiwanese system).
Previously, Bosco taught a graduate seminar on United States-China-Taiwan relations in the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
He earned his A.B. cum laude at Harvard College and his L.L.B. at Harvard Law School, where his third-year paper on U.S. policy in Vietnam was selected as an honors paper. He obtained his L.L.M. in International and National Security Law at Georgetown Law Center, where his honors paper focused on the international law implications of the 1995-1996 missile crises across the Taiwan Strait.
He has made presentations on East Asia security issues at several Washington think tanks and at universities across the country. He has been interviewed on CNN, Radio Free Asia, and Voice of America, and has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His articles, book reviews, and letters have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal, St. John’s Review, Chinese Yearbook of International Law, Weekly Standard, Politico, Real Clear World, National Interest, The Diplomat, Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs, Asia Review, Harvard Magazine, Harvard Law School National Security Journal, and The Hill.
In The People’s Republic of Desire, Hao Wu films the lonely shadows where the lines between online and offline dissolve.
During the past 15 years, China’s demand for primary commodities has triggered a dramatic increase in natural resource extraction in the developing world.
Police in the north China city of Tianjin confiscated 600 computers used to mine bitcoin cryptocurrency after the local power grid operator reported abnormal electricity usage, Xinhua reported Wednesday.
China and North Korea boast an alliance forged in blood -- more than 130,000 Chinese troops, including the son of Mao Zedong, died defending the North during the Korean War -- but the relationship has always been an uneasy one.
Sinovation Ventures, one of China’s prominent funds which is helmed by former Google China head Kaifu Lee, has announced a new investment fund that’s targeted at a total raise of $900 million.
