China

The China-Central Summit held last month attracted a lot of international attention. In the West, the summit was seen as a major step towards Chinese consolidation in the otherwise resource-rich region historically dominated by Russia. More specifically, the Western mainstream media, or Western political pundits, saw the summit as Beijing’s bid to fill the so-called ‘void’ created by Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine. The argument presented to the Western audience says that China is “replacing” Russia in Central Asia. Thus, the China-Russia alliance…

Beijing rejected Washington’s offer to conduct negotiations between Ministers of Defense on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue Summit against the background of mutual misunderstanding. The Singapore Security Summit for many years has served as a neutral forum for discussing controversies in the Asia-Pacific region, where even outspoken opponents can meet and clarify their mutual grievances without sacrificing credibility. This is why the PRC’s refusal to hold a meeting between Li Shangfu and Lloyd Austin has attracted increased global attention. The formal reason for rejecting the request was that the Chinese Ministers of Defense was under US sanctions. Li Shangfu previously…

Relations between People’s Republic of China and Europe resemble a complex mosaic, mainly due to significant presence of the sum of factors defined by the elastic term “politics.” The first of such important factors is the continuing prevailing influence of the United States on everything happening on the continent. All that despite the obvious shift of the Washington’s main interests towards the Indo-Pacific region, it plays its own game with Beijing, which is not always identical with European. But it is difficult to talk even about the European game with any degree of certainty due to obscurity of the very notion of “Europe” in and of itself…