China

Wen Jibao’s comments to the BBC about the euro crisis dramatise the shift in economic power from west to east. Jibao remarked that: “Trust is more important than currency and gold and now, during the debt crisis, we again bring trust to Europe. I have total trust in Europe’s economic development”. But China’s role in the euro crisis is far less problematic than Russia’s. As Stratfor has highlighted, if Russia — or one of its effectively state controlled companies — were to buy a considerable stake in Greece’s gas company DEPA when it is privatised (as it will be as part of the bailout package)  it could render irrelevant the

The pressure is being turned up on Colonel Gaddafi, but it may still take a while to have an effect. The Libyan dictator retains some form of power and has told the only person who has been granted access to see him, South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, that he intends to stay on in Libya. He wants a ceasefire before anything else is discussed. The rebels in Benghazi, meanwhile, want him to go before anything else is discussed. And so the bombing goes on. At the UN, people talk of negotiated settlement, fearing that chaos would follow Gaddafi’s killing. That may be true, but there has been little evidence so far

Hillary Clinton has given a fascinating interview to the Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg. The main topic of it is the Arab spring but it is her comments about China that are making waves. When Goldberg comments that the Chinese have been scared by the sight of dictatorships toppling across the Middle East, Clinton replies:“They’re worried, and they are trying to stop history, which is a fool’s errand. They cannot do it. But they’re going to hold it off as long as possible. “ As Goldberg says, it is quite remarkable to hear the US Secretary of State say so frankly that the Communist dictatorship in China will collapse at some point.

As the Libya crisis drags out, and Bashar al-Assad orders a crackdown in Syria, many have begun to doubt whether the changes seen in Tunisia and Egypt will actually spread to the rest of the Middle East. One former British ambassador recently suggested that perhaps the peoples of the Middle East preferred a mixture of authoritarianism and democracy — and that Britain should accept this; not impose its values and views.   But there is plenty of reason for optimism. The first is to look at the countries that have transformed themselves over the course of the last fifty years. Powerhouses like India and Brazil, but also smaller countries such

As one famous artist vanished in Beijing, another appeared. Bob Dylan has begun a tour of China in the same week as Ai Weiwei became the most prominent victim of Beijing’s current repression drive. Ai has been unlawfully incarcerated for what the authorities describe as ‘economic crimes’, and the cry has gone out for his release. Except that the cry has been more of a whimper. Western governments have largely ignored Beijing’s clampdown, which began in February as democratic activism spread from Cairo to Chinese websites. No trade sanctions or UN Resolutions are being issued here, just stern communiqués. Some human rights activists have called on Bob Dylan’s celebrity to

The multiple crises in North Africa, from the revolution in Tunisia, through the protests in Egypt and to the conflict in Libya, has reinvigorated British foreign policy. In the last couple of years classic international issues have been pushed to the side by a need to focus on economic statecraft. Foreign ministers became less important as finance ministers gained prominence. This will now change, as leaders shift their focus onto the Libya crisis. The UN is again in focus, not the G20. The second change may be on East/West dynamics. Before the crisis, the air was thick with talk of a multipolar world and how power was flowing roughly from

We now know that Libya is heading into a full on civil-war and that Gaddafi is prepared to do pretty much anything to stay in power. The former interior minister Abdel Fattah Younes al-Abid, admittedly a partial source, says that he defected after arguing with the Libyan leader over his plan to bomb the rebel stronghold of Benghzai. In an ideal world, the United Nations would move to impose a no fly zone on Libya. But this is unlikely to happen. Russia and China, for obvious reasons, want to uphold the principle of non-interference in another state’s affairs even if that state is brutally repressing its own people.   This

The Middle East is set for renewed displays of public anger towards the region’s governments. Events in Bahrain are particularly worrying. Troops took control of the capital, killing at least four protesters in the worst violence in the Gulf kingdom in decades. The trouble in Bahrain, which houses the U.S. Navy’s 5th fleet and is home to a large U.S. military base, illustrates a point Ben Judah and I make in a new article: that the three pillars of US post-World War II power in the Middle East – commercial ties, military bases and client states – are crumbling: “A new Middle East is taking shape, buffeted by Pacific trade

Official figures suggest that China has replaced Japan as the world’s second largest economy, after an estimated 10 percent growth rate left China with an economy worth close to $5.8trillion at the end of quarter four 2010. Japanese growth hovered around the 3 percent mark in 2010 with a total GDP value of $5.47 trillion. Analysts have told the BBC that it is ‘realistic’ that China will overhaul the US’ economy in about a decade, which, as Pete has demonstrated, does not look too outrageous a suggestion.  All of this puts me in mind of the European Union. The CIA World Factbook records that the EU leads the globe in

Yesterday was momentous, but we should not lose sight of the head of the IMF saying that the Chinese renminbi could take steps to becoming a global reserve currency. To be specific: Dominique Strauss-Kahn has in mind adding renminbi to the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights system. In itself, no big deal – but a notable kiss being blown to Beijing. It fits a trend. The Chinese, notoriously, manipulate the value of their currency to keep their goods cheap, so they can’t have their currency treated with reserve status. But power is shifting – and America’s fiscal misbehaviour has unsettled international investors. John Peace, chairman of UK bank Standard Chartered, put

Today’s Times splashed on the spat between Britain and EU foreign policy “czar” Catherine Ashton over the embargo barring arms sales to China. The embargo was put in place after the Tianamen Square massacre and has remained in place, largely at US insistence, ever since. But is it the right policy? The policy has not prevented China from becoming a military power — its annual defense budget officially stands at $70 billion, although the Pentagon believes the real figure to be twice as high. China is developing carrier-killing missiles that even NATO does not have, and will soon sell weapons rather than seek to import them. There is, of course,