Japan’s Growing Quarrel with South Korea: Is China the Main Beneficiary?

Relations between Tokyo and Seoul have always been somewhat frosty, but recent developments are accentuating the animosity. Obama administration officials continue to press Seoul and Tokyo to resolve their differences on the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute, the comfort women issue, and other grievances. A comprehensive reconciliation between Seoul and Tokyo, U.S. leaders believe, is imperative to facilitate meaningful trilateral cooperation to deal with North Korea’s threatening behavior and China’s looming presence in the region.



Ted Carpenter, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute via CHINA US Focus http://ift.tt/1B8Uq0l

Chinese Holiday Customs in Transition

Holidays in China are changing. For the generation that lived though the 1960s and 1970s famine, they were associated with abundant eating. Notwithstanding the influence of western holidays, Xi Jinping’s anti-graft measures have considerably changed the holidays by fighting party extravagance of food and gifts with simplicity and thrift.



Qin Xiaoying, Research Scholar, China Foundation For Int'l and Strategic Studies via CHINA US Focus http://ift.tt/1zMg1rN

Russia Tops China as Principal Cyber Threat to US

“While I can’t go into detail here, the Russian cyber threat is more severe than we had previously assessed,” the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during the 2015 presentation of the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” The report lists sophisticated […]



The Diplomat via CHINA US Focus http://ift.tt/1w4uRhV

China: Exit Counter-Intervention, Enter Peripheral Defense

In a recent article in The Washington Quarterly, two well-respected scholars of Chinese military affairs seek to debunk the idea that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been designing its modernization drive and strategic planning around the concept of “counter-intervention,” which refers to the ability to force an outside power […]



The Diplomat via CHINA US Focus http://ift.tt/17RTNhD

China’s New Environmental Minister: A Rising Star

Chen Jining, China’s new minister of environmental protection, is a rising star in Chinese politics. He is on track to become a vice premier of the State Council in 2018 for four reasons: First, he has the right credentials. A graduate of Tsinghua University with bachelor and master’s degrees in […]



The Diplomat via CHINA US Focus http://ift.tt/1w4uT9y

How China Fuels Myanmar’s Wars

When an estimated 50,000 ethnic Kokang civilians poured into southwest China last month to escape fighting between the Myanmar Army and Kokang rebels, Beijing called for peace and provided food, medical supplies and camps for the refugees. But China’s stance as a benevolent mediator in Myanmar’s many internal conflicts and […]



New York Times via CHINA US Focus http://ift.tt/1w4rY0D

“Up to a point”: The China-Pakistan Relation

Andrew Small, The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (C. Hurst & Co, 2015). The Red Mosque assault (2007) and the Nanga Parbat attack (2013), two of the episodes that are discussed in Andrew Small’s new book, tell us that the most recent years have been among the most difficult in […]



Alessandro Rippa PhD., University of Aberdeen via CHINA US Focus http://ift.tt/1Ej6wq7