For decades, scholars have been examining Chinese engagements overseas, exploring for instance China’s involvement with Third World struggles during the Maoist era, the evolution of its foreign aid approaches, cultural diplomacy, diasporic activities, and later, the expansion of foreign investment. Only re…

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was launched by China as a new multilateral development bank in early 2016, just over a month after governments adopted the Paris Agreement. Despite the AIIB’s president commitments to make the bank ‘green’, these promises so far have not been put into practi…

In the past two decades, China’s ascendance in the world has given rise to ‘Global China’ as a subject of public debate and scholarly inquiry. If ‘Global China Studies’ is an emerging field of knowledge, it may be helpful to reflect on what our central concept is. We can discern at least three meanings of …

In terms of lending power, the China Development Bank (CDB) is the largest development bank in the world, one of the most important financiers of infrastructure and extractive projects globally, and a key instrument to support Chinese international economic policies such as the Going Out strategy of the la…

In late 2021, Lithuania, a small country in Eastern Europe, managed to infuriate Beijing by welcoming a Taiwanese Representative Office in its capital, Vilnius. In Lithuania—a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that gained independence from the Soviet Union only …

Western media regularly and casually suggest that China is pursuing ‘world domination’ (The Economist 2021). US national security officials evangelise the view that the country has a ‘grand strategy to displace American [global] order’ and perhaps even reduce their country to a ‘deindustrialized, English-s…

In September 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced in a speech to the UN General Assembly that China aimed to hit peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 (Xi 2020). The statement focused on China’s domestic emissions, but in the months that followed, there was much sp…

When the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was first announced by China in 2013, a flurry of speculation erupted around which countries would join and how closely the new institution would follow the path trodden by traditional multilateral development banks such as the World Bank. Human rights a…