The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit will take place at a delicate time for Chinese President Xi Jinping, as he confronts enormous challenges related to the ongoing trade war with the United States and, at the same time, huge opportunities to expand his country’s role in global affairs. What should African leaders should be prepared for when they arrive in Beijing?
The company, like all major US tech platforms, has been blocked in the country since 2009. Facebook said on Wednesday it had secured a licence to set up an “innovation hub to support Chinese developers, innovators and start-ups”. But 24 hours later, there are widespread reports the licence has been withdrawn from the government database.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has signed a slate of investment deals during a weeklong tour of Africa, feeding into concerns in the West and on the continent over ballooning levels of indebtedness to Beijing and its expanding political footprint.
Of the 27 deals signed between China and the Philippines during Duterte’s visit to Beijing in October 2016, China originally agreed to provide $9 billion in soft loans, including a $3 billion credit line with the Bank of China, with a further $15 billion worth of direct investments from Chinese firms in railway, port, energy and mining projects. It didn’t specify a timeline.
Chinese netizens have turned to blockchain to share a censored news story about faulty vaccines given to small babies. Their efforts to repost an investigative piece about a large vaccine maker were largely thwarted by Internet monitors, but by sticking the story within the metadata of a cryptocurrency transaction, netizens have been able to outsmart the censors, as first spotted by TechNode.
The explosion happened on the street outside the southeast corner of the embassy compound. Beijing police said the suspect, a 26-year-old man from China’s Inner Mongolia region, had injured his hand and been taken to the hospital. Police did not provide a motive.
Alfred A. Knopf: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the 19th-century Opium War.
When Britain launched its first war on China in 1839, pushed into hostilities by profiteering drug merchants and free-trade interests, it sealed the fate of what had long been seen as the most prosperous and powerful empire in Asia, if not the world. But internal problems of corruption, popular unrest, and dwindling finances had weakened China far more than was commonly understood, and the war would help set in motion the eventual fall of the Qing dynasty—which, in turn, would lead to the rise of nationalism and communism in the 20th century. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it.
In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China—traveling mostly in secret beyond Canton, the single port where they were allowed—even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable and mostly peaceful meeting of civilizations at Canton over the long term that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American individuals, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Ian Morris, The New York Times (July 2, 2018)
Julia Lovell, The Guardian (June 27, 2018)
The policy environment for domestic NGOs; the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals; foreign NGOs and Taiwan; and the #MeToo movement. . .
Virgilio Bisio is an Analyst at The Asia Group in Washington, D.C., where he helps clients understand and navigate China’s complex business, regulatory, and political environment. He works extensively with technology and financial services clients and designs analytical products that cover breaking commercial developments across the Indo-Pacific. Bisio also conducts research on China’s economy for the Economist Intelligence Unit and develops digital content for Young China Watchers, a global non-profit focused on developing the next generation of China experts.
Before joining The Asia Group, Bisio was a Junior Fellow on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society Policy Institute, where he performed in-depth research on the U.S.-China economic relationship, Chinese industrial policy, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Prior to that, he managed a semiconductor production line at a Shenzhen-based manufacturing company. He is also a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Bisio holds a Master’s degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in History and Chinese from Trinity College. He is fluent in Chinese.
Establishing operations in Taiwan wasn’t the most logical option for international organizations whose missions demanded they be on the ground to engage with the challenging but dynamic “wild west” of civil society work in the P.R.C. Could the Foreign NGO Law alter this status quo?
