After the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was first proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, a number of observers, including within Japan and the United States, questioned its underlying motivations. The intensity with which the bank was both attacked and defended in the period before it opened its doors has thrown a spotlight on debates that existed long before Xi’s 2013 announcement. Chief among them are fundamental questions about who should dictate the rules of global governance and what role multilateral development banks (MDBs) should play in carrying them out. The AIIB concluded its second annual meeting in Jeju Island, South Korea on June 16, yet many of those questions remain open.
Jun 29, 2017
The recent kidnapping and murder of two Chinese nationals by ISIL in the Pakistani province of Balochistan raises a fundamental question: how will China secure its ambitious and potentially transformative Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? If recent developments are an indication, Beijing plans to send in the Marines. In March, China quietly revealed plans to expand the People’s Liberation Army Marine Corps (PLAMC) from 20,000 to 100,000 with the intent to garrison an unspecified number of marines at its “dual use” port facilities in Obock, Djibouti and Gwadar, Pakistan.
Jun 26, 2017
It reads like a scene from Henry Kissinger’s worst nightmare. China, Russia, and four Central Asian states gather today in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, to welcome India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security and economic club that excludes the United States. But what might have alarmed U.S. strategists during the Cold War could be cause for relief. The expansion signals a potential shift away from military coordination and toward economic cooperation.
Jun 8, 2017
Welcome to the world’s newest blue water ocean: the Arctic Ocean. You are forgiven if you think the Arctic is a mostly frozen and forbidding place covered in darkness for most of the year. It still is. But this ocean is rapidly changing: since 1979 Arctic sea ice maximum extent has dropped by an average of 2.8 percent per decade; in the summertime, the ice cap declined at 13.5 percent per decade; and the Greenland Ice Sheet lost an estimated 9,103 gigatons or over 9 trillion tons of ice since 1900 and between 25 to 35 gigatons annually. On land, the near-surface permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere is projected to decline by 20 percent relative to today’s area by 2040, and it could be reduced by as much as two-thirds by 2080 under a scenario of high greenhouse-gas emissions. We may be at the dawn of a new Arctic Age.
Jun 1, 2017
Quotes and Quotas is a weekly digest of phrases and facts that help explain Asia’s infrastructure push.
Jun 1, 2017