Eastern Asia

According to Japan’s ministry of defense, Tokyo has recently adopted a set of guidelines aimed at strengthening its national defense potential over the course of next decade. It is estimated that over the period of the next five years, Japan will have to spend on its armed forces some 238 billion dollars to successfully implement this plan.

An important event for international policy in 2019 has been held; two rounds of talks (between 7 and 9 January in Beijing, and between 30 and 31 January in Washington) dealt with the major challenge currently affecting relations between the two leading world powers, which is due to the present situation with bilateral trade. Since this issue is being raised by the American side, we will try to explore it from the American perspective.

On November 15 last year the popular Hong Kong-based newspaper Asia Times published an article with the headline: Cambodia at the Center of a New Cold War. The article claimed that since 2017 China has been actively lobbying Cambodia’s government to allow it to build naval bases near the port city of Koh Kong (the capital of Koh Kong Province) on the Gulf of Thailand, part of the South China Sea.

It is truly an amazing site: monstrous US hotels and casinos, just few hundred meters from the Mainland China. All that kitsch that one usually associates with Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but bigger, much bigger! In fact, Macau is the biggest casino sprawl in the world.
Casinos, most of them confined inside the US mega-hotels, make approximately 5 times more money here, than in Las Vegas.

The last time we discussed the subject of North Korean hackers was when the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions against the hacker Park Jin Hyok from DPRK and the North Korean company Chosun Expo Joint Venture, which he had worked for as a programmer, because of links connecting them to cyberattacks carried out on orders from Pyongyang.

Recent headlines across American and European news agencies have focused on the rise of a so-called Chinese “police state,” specifically in regards to security infrastructure put in place in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

The trends in Japan’s foreign policy that have been evident over the last few months have continued to play out, and in fact, intensified in January 2019. It is worth noting that Japan is one of several key players in the global political game during the current “post-Cold War” era. The same thing, by the way, could be said about Japan’s ally in the Second World War, Germany.

For many years now China has been actively expanding its economic presence in Africa. Accomplishments of the “Celestial Kingdom” are truly impressive. Currently, China is one of Africa’s biggest trading partners. More than a thousand Chinese companies have operations on the continent, and loans and investments that Africa receives from the PRC amount to dozens of billions of US dollars.