There is no consensus in the Chinese expert community regarding the time frame of the next North Korean nuclear test. However, the policy debate that started with the rise of the “abandonment school” after the third nuclear test, which occurred in February last year, has... MORE

Xi Jinping's new concept of “overall national security” (zongti guojiaanquan) was put to the test on April 30, when two alleged terrorists struck at the Urumqi Railway Station just a few hours after the President and Commander-in-Chief left Xinjiang after a four-day inspection trip. At... MORE

Official media publicly credited Guangdong elements of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) with breaking open an espionage case last week in which the chief suspect received a ten-year prison sentence. An unnamed foreign intelligence service reportedly recruited the suspect, one “Mr. Li,” in an... MORE

During his visit to Seoul in late 2013, Vladimir Putin almost explicitly warned the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK—North Korea) that, if it did not respond to Moscow’s proposal for a trans-Korean pipeline and railway, which would connect to Russia’s planned Siberian gas pipeline... MORE

In a move that both exacerbates international conflicts in the Western Pacific and suggests how Moscow plans to proceed in the Arctic, Russian President Vladimir Putin has closed to all outside shipping and fishing the entire Sea of Okhotsk—some 52,000 square kilometers of water that... MORE

Globally, 295 new nuclear power plants are under construction or planned by 2030. The total aggregate value of the total build is estimated at $1.23 trillion, with international procurement worth approximately $26 billion per annum. [1] The size and prestige of this market has long... MORE

China’s leadership has, in the past year, announced many reforms to the Chinese economy, and especially the country's financial system. Some are slated to be implemented over time, while some are already in the process of being implemented. How can we distinguish between the two,... MORE

China’s relentless global search for energy supplies has taken it from Central Asia to Sudan. But China imports oil from politically unstable nations such as inflation-ravaged Venezuela; Iran, constricted by international sanctions; and violence-ridden Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, increasing the... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin is scheduled to visit China for a summit in May. In advance of that meeting, Russian sources are again claiming that an agreement on a gas pipeline will be reached between Gazprom and its Chinese partners. Allegedly, both sides have agreed... MORE

In Beijing, a reminder for Hagel that the U.S. and China face divergent incentives on cyber policy U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s latest trip to Beijing represented a new milestone in Sino-U.S. military-to-military information-sharing. According to media reports, the U.S. side laid out in detail the... MORE