Flashpoints on the Periphery: Understanding China’s Neighborhood Opportunism

How is China taking advantage of the pandemic to pursue its foreign policy goals?

Tensions in China’s periphery have increased dramatically over the past few months as Beijing stepped up the use of military and diplomatic tools within its neighborhood. The frequency of the events involving Chinese actors, especially in the second half of March, increased as normalcy started returning to the mainland after the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak.This raises a few questions. First, is this evidence of China’s opportunism at a time when the United States is struggling to maintain its presence in the East and Southeast Asian regions? Second, has Beijing adopted a more aggressive approach for the post-pandemic period? Third, would the recent spike in activities impact the regional order?Read more

This article was originally published in The Diplomat.

China-style lockdown not the only way to deal with COVID-19. Democracies, learn from Taiwan

The manner in which the Chinese government managed the COVID-19 outbreak is being favourably compared to the general mess that Europe and the United States have made of it so far. Now that China seems to have contained the initial outbreak while Western countries are struggling with a massive surge in cases, Beijing’s propagandists and apologists have started asserting that the Chinese one-party, one-leader “system” is superior to a messy liberal democracy that is incapable of acting with the coherence, speed, and efficiency required to contain the pandemic.

But here’s a strange thing: prominent Chinese individuals who criticised President Xi Jinping and the Chinese “system” for botching up the initial response to the Wuhan outbreak have been arrested or mysteriously disappeared. In contrast, Americans, British, and Europeans are criticising their leaders, governments, and public health policies without the smallest risk of arrest or detention. If the Chinese system is really as good as it is cranked out to be, why the need to silence the critics?

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