This week, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Andrew Small, senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C. Andrew is one of surprisingly few scholars with specialized experience researching China's relations with what it calls its "all-weather friend" — Pakistan. His book from 2015 on the subject is titled The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics.
Kaiser, Jeremy, and Andrew discuss how Sino-Pakistani ties have been impacted by the recent election of Imran Khan to prime minister, Pakistan's economic difficulties, and the numerous projects that comprise the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC – one of the most important components of China's Belt and Road Initiative.
Recommendations:
Jeremy: What3Words, a startup that has divided the entire world into a grid of 57 trillion squares, each of them three meters by three meters (9.8 feet), and assigned each square a three-word address, generated randomly by computer. Improving.shrimps.legal, for instance, is located just south of the Chairman Mao portrait at Tiananmen in Beijing. Read more about the system and its implications for developing countries and China on SupChina.
Andrew: Two alternative views on how an economic “decoupling” of the U.S. and China could happen, other than the tariff-driven trade war path currently being taken. First, “Trump thinks a trade war with China is the only option, but it’s not,” a piece by Dan Rosen in Foreign Affairs, and second, “Jennifer Hillman testifies on addressing Chinese market distortions,” where the Georgetown Law professor lays out before the U.S. Senate in early June how litigation could be brought before the World Trade Organization to address grievances against China.
Kaiser: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, by Eric Schlosser.
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Beethoven in Beijing
China's new youth, with Alec Ash and Stephanie Studer
China's COVID-19 response and the virus's origins, with Deborah Seligsohn
Ryan Hass on his new book, ‘Stronger’
The parallel world of Chinese tech, with Lillian Li
Cheng Lei: The detention and arrest of an Australian CGTN reporter
Getting Chinese politics wrong, with Jude Blanchette
Julie Klinger on China's rare earth frontiers
Journalist Te-Ping Chen on her short fiction collection, Land of Big Numbers
The Xinjiang camps on Clubhouse
China’s struggle for tech ascendancy, with Dan Wang of Gavekal Dragonomics
Talking Taiwan with former national intelligence officer Paul Heer
A new U.S. strategy in East Asia, from the Quincy Institute
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Ryan Hass on the Biden administration's China direction
Ian Johnson and Lin Yao on "liberal" Chinese Trump supporters
Historian James Carter on the final days of Old Shanghai
Veteran diplomat Evan Feigenbaum on U.S. policy in a changing Asia
China and India: Pallavi Aiyar and Ananth Krishnan on mutual misperceptions
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