Eastern Asia

In the area of finance and creation of new financial institutions much hope of many nations has been placed on China. Last year China played a catalytic role in helping establish a new BRICS Infrastructure Development Bank to finance infrastructure projects in select emerging economies. Soon after Beijing announced it was creating another Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to finance a part of Asia’s huge infrastructure deficit.

Dear readers and authors, today is the first day of the New Red Fire Monkey Year, according to the ancient Chinese calendar. In the East people believe that this creature combines contradictory traits such as high intelligence, wisdom along with a tendency of making unexpected steps that would challenge cloudy and dull days.

On January 30th the United States committed a deliberate act of aggression against China when it sent the guided missile destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur within the 12 nautical mile territorial limit of one of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. The islands are claimed historically by China, though Vietnam also has filed claims to the islands under the Law of the Sea Convention. The Americans state that Taiwan also claims the islands but since Taiwan is just a province of China I will ignore that claim here.

An earlier article written in the wake of the fourth series of nuclear-weapon testing by North Koreans covered China’s response to those tests. However, taking into account today’s growing confrontation between China and the USA, the Chinese government didn’t demonstrate such a hard-line response as had been expected.

The Strait Times published an opinion piece by the London-based Rob Edens. Wishfully titled, “South-east Asia fast becoming unfriendly territory for China,” it attempts to portray Southeast Asia as increasingly pivoting West toward Washington, coincidentally just as Washington was “pivoting” East toward Asia.

Our analysis of the international response to North Korea’s test of a hydrogen bomb directs our attention to China’s position and US-China debates about “what to do and who to blame.”

In an analysis of the new global game, emerging in the post-Cold War period, it is of utmost importance to identify its main players, their purposes (which can generally vary in time) and strategies to achieve them, which are also subject to changes. This is particularly important in the face of emerging obvious signs of the complication and deepening of the game in several regions of the world.

North Korea’s actions could not but cause a reaction from the “civilized world”, and it can be assumed that all the parties concerned “played their role as usual”, albeit with some comments. For example, while condemning Pyongyang’s actions in general, none of the leaders openly confirmed the fact that tests of thermonuclear weapons took place.

On January 16 this year, a general election was held in Taiwan, in which the new president and vice president were elected and the entire composition of the Parliament was changed. As expected, Tsai Ing-wen, the current leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was without question elected for the main state office of the island.

When making forecasts about the nature of the future WPK Congress, we mentioned that certain things will become more obvious after the New Year’s speech, delivered by the North Korean leader. For this reason we would like to pay attention to what seemed to us to be the most important in his speech. Since Kim Jong-un is always very serious about his duties as national leader, his New Year’s speech is usually perceived as a sort of foundation for the future.