Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
While America is focused on fighting terror, it has turned the attention of policy makers and citizens away from Northeast Asia. China is no longer seen as the primary threat to the US. This has given China room to wield a new foreign policy in the region that establishes China's influence. Meanwhile, Russia and China are growing farther apart.
While it is not certain that North Korea would negotiate away their nuclear programs and fully abide by any agreement, such a resolution was and remains a possibility. By refusing to aggressively pursue a negotiated approach, the Bush administration has essentially green-lighted North Korea's nuclear program and may be encouraging the North to take even more drastic steps in the future.
Yasheng Huang, author of recently released Selling China: Foreign Direct Investment During the Reform Era, argued that surging levels of FDI are signs of weaknesses and inefficiencies in China's economy and banking system.
Beijing provides critical energy and food aid to Pyongyang. Indeed, without Beijing's economic support, conditions in North Korea are likely to deteriorate dramatically. Logically, China ought to be the country the US should court actively to increase the diplomatic pressure on North Korea and reduce the tensions over Pyongyang's dangerous nuclear programmes.
Moves by North Korea to restart its nuclear reactor program and by Iran to build advanced nuclear facilities to produce weapons-grade materials, threaten to blow the lid off long-standing nonproliferation efforts. The developments show that the approach being pursued by the current administration for preventing the spread of nuclear arms has failed and needs immediate adjustment.
Most observers examine the extent to which the Chinese government fulfills its WTO obligations. Carnegie's Veron Hung offers a different perspective. She examines a key aspect of China's legal system essential to China's implementation of its WTO obligations-independent judicial review.
On November 16-17, the China Program sponsored a two-day conference, "China after the 16th Party Congress," at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Twelve leading political scientists, economists, and sociologists from China, the United States, Hong Kong, and Singapore met to discuss recent trends in the Chinese economy, politics, society, and foreign policy.
Over 150 leading observers of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations attended a conference featuring prominent specialists to engage in discussion on the economic, diplomatic, military-political, and domestic politics dimensions of the U.S. role in Cross Strait relations.
The almost single-minded interest in the personnel matters surrounding China's upcoming leadership transition ignores a far more important point: very serious underlying issues of governance await China's next leadership, no matter who this might be.
U.S. legal experts and senior Chinese judges discuss the U.S., China, and the WTO.