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181. China's Growing Role in UN Peacekeeping

Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
Over the past twenty years China has become an active participant in UN peacekeeping, a development that will benefit the international community. Beijing has the capacity to expand its contributions further and should be encouraged to do so. China's approach to peacekeeping has evolved considerably since it assumed its UN Security Council (UNSC) seat in 1971, when it rejected the entire concept of peacekeeping. Now, with over 2,000 peacekeepers serving in ten UN peacekeeping operations worldwide, China's motivations for supporting and participating in peacekeeping have led it to adopt a case-by-case approach that balances those motivations against its traditional adherence to nonintervention. This pragmatic policy shift paves the way for China to provide much-needed personnel as well as political support and momentum for peacekeeping at a time when both conflicts and peacekeeping operations are becoming more complex. China's involvement also further binds it to the international system.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Foreign Policy, Peace Studies, and United Nations
Political Geography:
China and Beijing

182. How the West Was Won: China\'s Expansion into Central Asia

Author:
Henryk Szadziewski
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Caucasian Review of International Affairs
Institution:
The Caucasian Review of International Affairs
Abstract:
In the People\'s Republic of China, the Great Western Development Drive has been promoted as a solution to the economic inequalities that exist between the eastern and western regions of the country. Although the initiative has overt economic objectives, these are accompanied by political objectives of internal security in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, an area also known as East Turkestan. The Great Western Development Drive also works in conjunction with China\'s economic and political objectives for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. As a bridge to the markets of Central Asia, the Great Western Development Drive in East Turkestan has built an infrastructure with which China can export goods and import natural resources. Greater economic cooperation between Central Asia and China has also permitted the silencing of Uyghur dissent in Shanghai Cooperation Organization member states. The net result of China\'s expansion into Central Asia for Uyghurs in the region and in East Turkestan has been economic and political marginalization, most notably in the visible exclusion from the policies and projects of the Great Western Development Drive.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
China, Turkey, and Asia

183. The Internationalization of Chinese and Indian Firms: Trends, Motivations and Policy Implications

Author:
Sandeep Kapur and Suma Athreye
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
The last two decades have seen a significant rise in the internationalization of firms from developing economies. In addition to their growing participation in international trade, a number of leading emerging economies are contributing to growing outflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. According to the 2008 World Investment Report, outward flows of FDI from developing countries rose from about US$6 billion between 1989 and 1991 to US$225 billion in 2007. As a percentage of total global outflows, the share of developing countries grew from 2.7% to nearly 13.0% during this period.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, Globalization, International Political Economy, Markets, Foreign Direct Investment, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States, China, and India

184. Historical beliefs and the perception of threat in Northeast Asia: colonialism, the tributary system, and China–Japan–Korea relations in the twenty-first century

Author:
Peter Hays Gries, Qingmin Zhang, Yasuki Masui, and Yong Wook Lee
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
Historical controversies continue to plague northeast Asian politicstoday, with Chinese and Koreans protesting Japanese history textbooksand Japanese politicians\' visits to Yasukuni Shrine, and Koreans protestingChinese claims that the ancient Kingdom of Goguryo was Chinese,not Korean. Yet, there is little empirical research exploring what, if any,impact historical beliefs have on threat perception and foreign policypreferences in northeast Asia today. On the basis of surveys of Chinese,Japanese, and South Korean university students, this paper explores the relationships among beliefs about the past, perceived threat in thepresent, and foreign policy preferences for the future. Results and theirimplications for northeast Asian security are discussed.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Korea

185. Ocean frontier expansion and the Kalayaan Islands Group claim: Philippines\' postwar pragmatism in the South China Sea

Author:
Ulises Granados
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Institution:
Japan Association of International Relations
Abstract:
In 1946, the Philippines raised claims in the South China Sea over an area already known as Spratly Islands. This claim advanced through peculiar stages, starting when Thomas Cloma allegedly discovered islands in 1946, later named as Freedomland, and maturing to some extent in 1978 by the government\'s claim over the so-called Kalayaan Island Group. Considered as an oceanic expansion of its frontiers, this paper reviews the basis of the claim, first over the nature of Cloma\'s activities, and secondly over the measures the Philippine government took as a reaction of Cloma\'s claim of discovery of an area already known in western cartography as the Spratlys. Eventually, what is the nature of the link between the 1978 Kalayaan Islands Group\'s official claim and 1956 Cloma\'s private one?
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
China, Philippines, and Island

186. Where Minds Meet: The "Professionalization" of Cross-Strait Academic Exchange

Author:
Günter Schucher
Publication Date:
08-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
In international relations, transnational academic exchange or, more generally, cultural exchange is usually seen as a function of the quality of bilateral relations. As a variety of public diplomacy intended to win the “hearts and minds” of intellectuals in another country, the development of educational exchanges depends on the twists in foreign policy. Academic exchange across the Taiwan Strait commenced in the late 1980s, directly after the lifting of the travel ban, and had gathered momentum by the mid-1990s. It even accelerated further after the inauguration of the pro-independence Chen-government in Taiwan in 2000, creating the “paradox” of the expansion of social contacts in times of frosty political relations. One possible explanation for this is that due to the rather unique situation in the Taiwan Strait people-to-people exchanges between Taiwan and mainland China have been officially promoted as a substitute for official contacts. What is often neglected by analysts of cross-Strait relations, however, is the fact that academic exchange is also a response to the global pressure to internationalize higher education. Within this two-dimensional framework (international relations and the internationalization of higher education), cross-Strait academic exchange has been developing its own dynamic. The outcome has been an increasing amount of nonofficial communication and the growing “professionalization” (in the sense of the academic profession) of academic exchange.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
China, Taiwan, and Asia

187. Pacific Asia and the Asia Pacific: The Choices for APEC

Author:
C. Fred Bergsten
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum comprises 21 developed and developing economies that surround the Pacific Rim. The organization was created in 1989 and holds annual Leaders' Meetings that bring together its heads of government. In this policy brief, I assess the record of the APEC over the 20 years of its existence and discuss the world environment in which APEC is likely to be operating in the next 20 years, with a particular focus on the major change in global institutional arrangements implied by the replacement of the Group of Seven/Eight (G-7/8) by the Group of Twenty (G-20) as the chief steering committee for the world economy and, within that group and other international economic organizations, the increasingly central role of an informal and de facto Group of Two (G-2) between China and the United States.
Topic:
International Relations, International Trade and Finance, Regional Cooperation, and Treaties and Agreements
Political Geography:
United States, China, Asia, and Australia/Pacific

188. China's Changing Outbound Foreign Direct Investment Profile: Drivers and Policy Implications

Author:
Daniel H. Rosen and Thilo Hanemann
Publication Date:
06-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
In 1967 Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber published Le defi americain, a call to beware of American multinationals buying up the world. In the 1980s and 1990s it was Japan's turn, spawning books like Clyde Prestowitz's 1993 Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan. Today it is China's outbound foreign direct investment (OFDI) that elicits the most anxiety China's OFDI has reached commercially and geoeconomically significant levels and begun to challenge international investment norms and affect international relations.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Foreign Direct Investment
Political Geography:
China, America, and Asia

189. Avoiding Mutual Misunderstanding: Sino-U.S. Relations and the New Administration

Author:
Tianjian Shi and Meredith Wen
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
After the election of Barack Obama as president, Carnegie's Beijing Office assembled a group of leading scholars of international relations to discuss their expectations of the new administration. This policy brief conveys their opinions on various aspects of Sino-American relations and on America foreign policy in general.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
United States, China, and Beijing

190. Crisis and Consensus; America and ASEAN in a New Global Context

Author:
Donald K. Emmerson
Publication Date:
02-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Abstract:
No crisis is uniformly global. The suffering and the opportunity that a “global” crisis entails are always unevenly distributed across countries, and unevenly across the population inside any one country. That said, one can nevertheless argue that we—not the old royal “we” but, more presumptuously, the new global “we”—are in January 2009 experiencing the latest of four dramatic changes that major parts of the world have undergone over the last twenty years. In 1989, of course, the Berlin Wall was breached, ending the Cold War, followed by the implosion of Lenin's Soviet dystopia two years later. Nor did the 1989 massacre of proreform demonstrators in Tiananmen Square revive a command economy in China. Instead it kept the polity shut so that Deng's economy could continue to open.
Topic:
International Relations, Globalization, and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
United States, China, America, Israel, Asia, and Berlin