China & Taiwan

On October 4, Kyrgyzstan held parliamentary elections. Four political parties received enough vote to garner seats in the parliament. Of those four, three were closely aligned with then-President Sooronbay Jeenbekov. The results of the election sparked outrage against the...

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy project to expand the People’s Republic of China’s investment and trade ties in order to create “a big family of harmonious coexistence.” Hailed as...

We know for a fact from polling that this is not an election in which major foreign policy issues or the differing worldviews of the candidates are looming large in the minds of voters. Where these issues do creep...

The post-Cold War period, defined by American leadership promoting garowing integration under a liberal framework—a process aided by changes and developments in technology—is giving way to a new epoch, in which the rise of other major powers, coupled with...

According to geologists, rare earths are not rare, but they are precious. The answer to what appears to be a riddle lies in accessibility. Comprising 17 elements that are used extensively in both consumer electronics and national defense equipment,...

For nearly two decades, diplomats from Southeast Asian countries and China have met to discuss the implementation of a “code of conduct” for the South China Sea. The goal of that code is to manage the tensions that may...

If we are re-entering an era of “great power competition,” then there is an unavoidable question: what role do nuclear weapons play in that competition? China is set to double its nuclear capacity while it pursues its own nuclear...

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC), China’s central bank, is expected to publicly launch a digital version of the yuan as soon as late 2020. The project is being fast-tracked, partly in response to Facebook’s Libra and the COVID-19...

How does the People’s Republic of China use multilateral institutions in Central Asia? In the 1990s and early 2000s, multilateral bodies were a means of working with the Russian Federation and other countries in the region collaboratively. More recently,...

On August 18, Mali’s President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was overthrown in a coup d’etat led by breakaway elements of the Malian Armed Forces. The United Nations (UN) swiftly condemned the coup, and the Economic Community of West African States...