Archives China - Page 26 of 54 - New Eastern Outlook

The situation in South Asia over the past few weeks has been marked by a number of notable events, of which the dramatic developments in Bangladesh deserve special attention. Her departure was provoked by mass demonstrations in which students and other young people played a decisive role…

Recently, on 25^th July 2024, the Washington Post published an article “How four U.S. presidents unleashed economic warfare across the globe”, in which some interesting statistics were noted. Firstly, the US imposes three times as many sanctions as any other country (or group of countries) on earth. Secondly, that around one third of all countries on earth are on the receiving end of some form of US sanctions, and that the effectiveness of such sanctions has been, to say the least, limited, despite being the “go to” option of the US government for inflicting punishment on countries from Iran to Cuba, Russia to Myanmar.

For the past several years, the Middle East has been China’s key trading hub, not least because of more than 70 per cent of the oil that Beijing imports from here. Between 2017 and 2022, China’s bilateral trade with this region jumped from US$262 billion to US$507 billion. In 2022 alone, the region saw its trade with China jumping by more than 27 per cent. This was the largest increase in China’s trade compared with other regions, such as the ASEAN.