When: Thursday, Apr 11th, 8:00 P.M.(EDT)
Where: Online (Register here)

The deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli devastation of Gaza and resulting humanitarian catastrophe have generated geopolitical repercussions throughout the Middle East and beyond. In addition to regional actors like Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all of the major powers, including China, Russia, and the United States, have sought to realign their foreign policies to maximize positive outcomes from the Israel/Gaza disaster and minimize negative consequences.

We have heard a lot about the U.S. response to the Gaza disaster, but far less about that of these other countries, especially China. But while China is not a major player in the Israel/Hamas dispute, it has been increasingly active in the Middle East and has sought to play an active role in resolving the conflict.
What, then, is China's stance on the Israel/Hamas dispute, and how does Beijing propose to resolve it? 

"US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a call on Tuesday in an effort to keep tensions between the two countries at a simmer... While the discussion did not significantly alter the status of the countries' relationship, experts said that may not be the point."

Recently, Global Times reporters...  interviewed Odd Arne Westad (Westad), Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a leading expert in Cold War history, to analyze the evolution of the international landscape from a historian's perspective. He believes that the "post-Cold War era" that has lasted for a generation is coming to an end, although it is still unclear what kind of new international order will replace it.

A new poll suggests 51 per cent of Canadians support banning the social media app TikTok, after a U.S. bill aiming to do just that passed in the House of Representatives.
Canada has ordered its own national security review of TikTok, something the Liberal government revealed following passage of the U.S. bill earlier this month.
Just under a third of respondents, 28 per cent, said they would oppose a ban, according to the Leger poll of 1,605 Canadians conducted March 23 to 25. The poll does not have a margin of error because online polls aren't considered truly random samples.

The House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill this month threatening to ban TikTok unless its parent company ByteDance sells the app. It may take the Senate months to address the legislation, which faces some opposition, so a ban is not imminent. But the relative success of this approach highlights the narrow, problematic pathway for data security reform in the U.S. as we continue to avoid real oversight.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) is warning that new research restrictions being imposed by the Canadian government raise serious concerns about racial profiling, academic freedom, and international scientific collaboration. 
CAUT executive director David Robinson reacted to the new restrictions announced this January stating “Academics and students of Chinese origin are already being targeted and that is creating a chill on academic research and partnerships.”

In 2023, China‘s ambitious but controversial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) celebrated its 10-year anniversary. During its lifetime, this massive, Beijing-led global infrastructure and foreign policy program — which spans Eurasia, Africa, and even Latin America — underwent significant change. At its inception, one of the BRI‘s stated aims was to address a serious gap in development financing for large infrastructure projects in low-income countries. A decade later, new BRI projects are instead smaller in scale and centred on more economically lucrative sectors (e.g. energy and technology) and geographic areas (e.g. middle-income economies). 

Russia and China vetoed a U.S.-authored resolution in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on March 22 on the situation in Gaza. The text “determines the imperative for an immediate and sustained ceasefire” stopping short of an explicit call for a halt to Israel‘s six-month long attack on besieged Gaza that has killed almost 32,000 Palestinians.
The U.S. authored the resolution after vetoing three successive UNSC resolutions on Gaza, including a February 20 resolution presented by Algeria that had called for an immediate ceasefire.

China has sent more than a million bottles of water from melting Tibetan glaciers to the Maldives, officials said on Thursday (Mar 28), a gift from the world's highest mountains to a low-lying archipelago threatened by rising seas.
The Indian Ocean nation of 1,192 tiny coral islands is on the frontlines of the climate crisis, with salt levels seeping into the land and corrupting potable water, leaving it dependent on desalination plants.

China is committed to reforms that will upgrade the technological level of its largely manufacturing-based economy and exploit green technologies expected to drive around $1.4 trillion in annual revenues, a senior Communist Party official said Thursday.

It is often said that when we name something, we give it power. This week we marked the UN‘s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination–now is the time to name Sinophobia as one of the most insidious scourges of our time.
It has seeped into the mainstream media, stories of Chinese spies and Chinese subterfuge becoming as natural as the daily weather forecast. China‘s rise as a global economic powerhouse and a challenge to Western capitalist hegemony has triggered a “new cold war.” With it has come the rise in sinophobia on a worldwide scale which even the Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has pointed out.

But behind the relatively tiny U.S.-China trade numbers of the 1970s, Ingleson finds the story of a group of American entrepreneurs and Chinese policymakers who laid the foundations for the dramatic change that was about to come. This transformation would culminate with companies like Nike, Apple and Walmart relying on Chinese workers to manufacture their products, in the process lifting millions Chinese people out of poverty, killing millions of American jobs and launching China's economy into the stratosphere.

A sad fact about the politics of Washington is that some of the most important issues facing the United States and the world are rarely debated in a serious manner. Nowhere is that more true than in the area of foreign policy. For many decades, there has been a “bipartisan consensus” on foreign affairs. Tragically, that consensus has almost always been wrong. Whether it has been the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the overthrow of democratic governments throughout the world, or disastrous moves on trade, such as entering the North American Free Trade Agreement and establishing permanent normal trade relations with China, the results have often damaged the United States’ standing in the world, undermined the country’s professed values, and been disastrous for the American working class.
This pattern continues today...