Geography Archives: China

Greetings everyone. Of course I want to start by thanking Friends of Socialist China for inviting me to participate in this meeting today. When I received the invitation in early February I didn’t know, I don’t think anyone knew, that the world would change irrevocably just a few weeks later.

Last Thursday, the Acting Foreign Minister of the Taliban interim government Amir Khan Muttaqi made a stunning remark to greet the visiting Chinese Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kabul when he said, “This is the most important high-level delegation received by Afghanistan.”

DOES the Ukraine war and the action of the U.S., EU, and the UK spell the end of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency? Even if the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine reach a 15-point peace plan, as Financial Times has reported, the fallout for the dollar still remains.

Friends of Socialist China, located in London, is a platform dedicated to supporting the People’s Republic of China and promoting understanding of Chinese socialism. 

The war in Ukraine has focused attention on the shifts taking place in the world order. Russia’s military intervention has been met with sanctions from the West as well as with the transport of arms and mercenaries to Ukraine.

Leon Panetta, the former US secretary of defense and CIA director under Barack Obama and White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, said Thursday that the United States is involved in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

Chinese people and the Chinese government are two different things on this issue. Among Chinese people there’s been huge energetic support for Russia, there was even a movement among people to buy all the Russian products from online shops in China and everything sold out very quickly.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Russia relations, Ukraine, Humanitarian Aid, Taiwan, China-EU relations, China-Central Asia relations, sanctions, differing views of democracy, and European security.

Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market.

The Republican evangelical right scapegoats trans people as their latest “culture war” to mobilize far-right support and secure corporate interests.

A flurry of recent newspaper articles have denounced what they describe as Chinese imperialism. Such texts are part of a new Cold War media blitz against China that simultaneously serves U.S. imperialism by blessing it or denying that it exists.

With the official stance shifting from all-in to wait-and-see, the future of biodegradable plastic in China is uncertain.

In the strategic vision of the U.S., Russia should be disarmed to become part of Europe as a “sidekick” and a bridgehead to contain China, the “more dangerous enemy” as Kissinger described it.

Apart from the fact that China’s food system offers lessons that could improve policy-making in both high and low-income countries, the world’s most populous country is also one of the world’s major producers of food despite having less cultivated land.

Already threatening war with Russia, the White House this month has unveiled a new imperial grand strategy for the Indo-Pacific that raises the prospects of war with China.

What about this China factor? Why do Western pundits/savants pay so little heed to this game-changer? It should not require my half-century of studying/reporting on Russia-China relations to notice that China and Russia have never been so strategically close as now.

The key elements conform to a principled stance—and a balanced one. India’s stance so far has been one of a ‘standoffish’ attitude that basically absolves Delhi of the need to take a position on which its key ally the United States and the time-tested Russian friend have locked horns. 

Arguably the best known contemporary proponent of Chinese exceptionalism in the English-language is Martin Jacques, best known for his 2009 bestseller ‘When China Rules the World’, a tour-de-force in the repackaging of orientalist tropes for the 21st-century.

The Chinese embassy in Ukraine released a notice on its WeChat public account Friday to urge Chinese nationals in Ukraine to “pay close attention to” changes in the local situation, as the U.S. and several other Western countries asked their nationals “to evacuate immediately” amid so-called warnings of an imminent invasion by Russia.

In early December 2021, Laos inaugurated the Boten-Vientiane railway, a 414-kilometer (km) electrified high-speed railway that runs between the capital Vientiane and the town of Boten on the Laos-China border.