Autore: Geopolitica Rivista – 30/12/2021
GEOPOLITICA ISSN 2009-9193 Vol X n. 1-2/2021 – La Cina e il Mondo – Indice e Abstracts FOCUS: LA CINA E IL MONDO Relations between People's China and Taipei and the reunification proposals put forward by Beijing from 1949 to 2016 I rapporti tra Cina popolare e Taipei e le proposte di riunificazione avanzate da Pechino dal 1949 al 2016 Rodolfo Bastianelli Analista geopolitico ABSTRACT We examine the reunification proposals put forward by People's China towards Taiwan from 1949 to 2016, the year of election of the pro-independence exponent Tsai Ing-wen under whose presidency relations between the two banks of the Strait worsened significantly. The analysis describes the policies adopted by Beijing and the proposals to reunite the island with People's China followed by Chinese leaders in four distinct periods: the first is from 1949, the year of the conquest of power by Mao's communist forces Zedong, to 1979, when Carter broke with Taipei and started official diplomatic relations with Beijing, the second takes into consideration the relations between 1979 and 1990, while in the last two paragraphs we observe the reunification proposals advanced under the presidency of Lee Teng – hui ( 1988 – 2000 ), Chen Shui – bian ( 2000 – 2008 ) and Ma Ying – jeou ( 2008 – 2016 ) KEYWORDS: People's China – Taiwan – United States – Reunification with Beijing – Taiwan independence The increase in gas exports towards the East L’aumento di esportazione di gas verso Est Greta Bordin Vision & Global Trends – International Institute for Global Analyses ABSTRACT: The Russian Federation's energetic pivot to the East started to be incorporated into the country's energy policy in the mid-2010s, resulting in the imposition of Western economic and financial sanctions against the country and the steady shift in global economic growth towards Asia-Pacific. Consequently, the recent decline in gas exports to Europe and, on the other hand, the increase to the Asia-Pacific region, particularly to the People's Republic of China, appears to be stimulated rather than caused by the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict. By analysing data on gas consumption, production, import and export, along with current Russian infrastructure and future projects for long-distance natural gas and LNG production and delivery, the following analysis aims at determining whether the Russian Federation will be able to redirect its gas export from Europe to Asia-Pacific in the short, medium, and long term in the face of a possible further exacerbation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. KEYWORDS: Russian Federation, gas market, People’s Republic of China Towards the construction of a whole new China Verso la costruzione di una Cina tutta nuova Daniela Caruso Università Internazionale per la Pace –Roma ABSTRACT In late 1978, the reform and open-door policy of China began with the adoption of a new economic development strategy during the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. By the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government began to pursue an open-door policy, in which it adopted a stance to achieve economic growth through the active introduction of foreign capital and technology while maintaining its commitment to socialism. China’s reform and opening-up policies introduced private business and market incentives to what was a state-led communist system. Prior to 1978, the private sector was virtually non-existent; today, private firms contribute to approximately 70 percent of China’s GDP. Despite the breadth of the changes, however, China’s economic reforms have been characterized by gradualism and experimentalism, or “crossing the river by feeling the stones”. The paper aims to summarize the focuses of Deng Xiaoping policy in order to get a framework, which includes the milestones for the rebuilding of China as a modern and flourishing country as well. Thanks to a careful selection of Chinese and English sources the work attempts to shape a coherent analysis in order to get a key to understanding contemporary China. KEYWORDS: China, reforms, private business, national defense Can China, India and Russia agree on Guidelines for a new political and economic world system? Côme Carpentier De Gourdon Researcher Euro-Asia Institute, India and convener of the Editorial Board of the World Affairs Journal ABSTRACT The global state of affairs can no longer be called an order, despite the will of the USA and its NATO confederates to keep enforcing it. It may be described as a system in the making, likely to remain very disorderly and acquire increasingly authoritarian features in the foreseeable future. Three civilizational states that were long kept on the margins of the ‘western liberal transcontinental empire’ are stamping their seals because of their economic, strategic and discursive influences. They all belong to the BRICS and the SCO, the most influential international strategic and economic groupings committed to reforming the existing global regime. Russia, India and China (RIC) see themselves as ancient and present or future superpowers. Russia is the most outspokenly revisionist state, committed to restoring its ‘near abroad’ sphere of influence, extending its interaction with all parts of the world and following a pattern of development and political organisation inspired by its own distinct civilisation and defined in the concept of Ruskiy Mir (Russian World). China and India are also civilizational nations which intend to reshape the global system through the influence of their respective cultures and socio-economic conditions. These largest states of Eurasia have acquired the ability and the will to frame a new interdependent international system. The Chinese President has recently announced that his government sponsors a ‘New Global Security Initiative’ in concert with the Russian Federation. This endeavour is a part of the complex process often described as an incipient ‘deglobalisation’. The article outlines the three vectors of this drive towards Chinese internal autonomy and international influence which are bound to influence Russia's and India's own policies. Will China will be the biggest victim of deglobalization, given its driving role in the current economic regime, leaving India and Russia in comparatively stronger positions, or will it emerge as the winner of this new titanic struggle for dominance? KEYWORDS: China, Russia, India Evolution of political and economic relations between Cuba and China Evolución de las relaciones políticas y económicas entre Cuba y China Gladys Cecilia Hernández Pedraza Jefa del Departamento de finanzas Internacionales del Centro de investigaciones de la economía mundial CIEM. ABSTRACT In 2020, 60 years passed since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and China. This period has served to strengthen these relationships and show fundamental elements that characterize the crucial dimension achieved by these links. In general, it can be stated that cooperation, close friendship and the defense of mutual interests have predominated, determining an atypical relationship between a small country, Cuba, and a large one like China, whose population is around 120 times larger than that of China. Cuba’s territory is almost 100 times that of Cuba, as well as the exemplary relationship between two countries so geographically distant and at the same time so close, on the basis of equality and mutual respect. The complementarity of both economies and the excellent political environment in which Cuban-Chinese ties are developed, highlight, on the one hand, the enormous potential to be exploited in the economic, commercial and cooperation sphere, and on the other, how much remains to be done on the path to elevating these relations to the same level as the traditional and proven political ties. KEYWORDS: Cuba, China, Economic relations Whether Hockey Sticks or Thucydides Trap in China – United States Relations Phil Kelly Professor Department of Social Sciences Emporia State University United States of America ABSTRACT Two competing international-relations models, of realism and of classical geopolitics, differ in they are predicting either strife or calm in future China and United States relations. Both follow a similar description — a rising China amidst a declining United States, with possible conflict between the two nations. Yet, the models depart in their outcomes, the first, realism, in inevitable conflict and war, and the second, geopolitics, in uneasy but continued and profitable collaboration. That comparison serves as the focus of this article. In realism, conflict and likely war between the two states will arrive naturally, an inevitable strife reflective of a “Thucydides trap” as posited by this general of the ancient Greece Peloponnesian War. Here, he saw a rising Sparta alarming a dominant Athens, sparking armed warfare in this changing environment. For many today, that image appears to have repeated, the United States threatened by China, and thus, making war a good possibility between the two nations. In geopolitics, this same scenario, instead, will end in compromise and negotiation, a contrasting picture of two parallel-placed hockey sticks, their frames pointed away from each other and not crossing, again depicting a rising China amid a resisting United States. But in this scenario, the US stays ahead of China, with China not contesting the US primacy. The picture reveals a calmer and stabler outcome – a US-China condominium of cooperation and stability, albeit one also of competition and suspicion. KEYWORDS: China-US relationship, Classic geopolitics, Conflict The maritime power of the new Han empire Il potere marittimo del nuovo impero Han Gino Lanzara Visiting Research Fellow, Webster University di Ginevra ABSTRACT The paper offers an overall picture of China in order to point out the new naval skills and the possible power projections. In a context where the Belt and Road Initiative draws unprecedented economic trajectories, the need for a powerful and effective naval instrument is confirmed for Beijing. KEYWORDS: Economics, Silk Road, Choke Points, PLAN, Thalassocracy, The Dragon and the Crescent Il Dragone e la Mezzaluna Brahim Ramli, Scuola Normale Superiore - Emanuel Pietrobon InsideOver e Ambrosetti ABSTRACT The People's Republic of China entered the Middle East many years ago and is willing to remain within and around it in the context of the building of the Belt and Road Initiative, also know as the New Silk Road. Chinese and Muslims share a centuries-old love-hate relationship, made of mutual distrust, regular wars and insurgencies, and such a complexity has never gone away. However, the Muslim world's leading powers have warmly welcomed the quiet arrival of the PRC, which took place concurrently with the return of Russia, and are now intensifying their collaboration with it hopefully to catalyse the so-called multipolar transition. Indeed, both the PRC and the first-class Muslim powers share a common frenemy: the West, more in detail the United States. The Middle East is likely to play a greater role in the years to come, because of its natural resources and because is home to decades-old conflicts which make it the perfect theater to destabilize by means of terrorism, insurgencies and proxy wars. The PRC's ever-growing influence in the region is set to galvanize such deep-rooted instability, as the US is unlikely to retreat from the region peacefully. Curiously, one of the potential battlefields between the blocs might be the Holy Land. KEYWORDS: China, Middle East, Israel The risk of offside. The West and accounts with China: crisis in Europe and challenge to the East Il rischio del fuori gioco. L’Occidente e i conti con la Cina: crisi in Europa e sfida ad Oriente Giuseppe Romeo Università del Piemonte Orientale, Università di Torini ABSTRACT «Historical perspective is not a luxury but a necessity» remembered John King Fairbank, Harvard historian and expert of American sinology, when in 1948, he had affirmed that in order to understand the policies and actions of Chinese leaders it was necessary to have a good knowledge of the history of China. An obviousness for a European culture devoted to doubt and deepening, but less obvious for an American approach more conditioned by assessments of instinct and interest than of substances. From Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, the new post-marxist and post-confucian China is preparing to play its cards for global leadership in a moment in which Russia sees in Ukraine the appointment with its destiny as a power and the United States which has emerged even more fragile and a debt to the credibility of the commitment in Central Asia. The article, with these premises and written close to the russian-ukrainian crisis, aims to offer a key to reading an unequal model of international relations and which rejects the unilateralism of the United States to the advantage of a power distribution of which China presents itself as the best promoter in recent years. KEY WORDS: China, no Western World, multilateralism China and Central Asia thirty years after the end of the USSR Cina e Asia centrale a trent’anni dalla fine dell’URSS Fabrizio Vielmini Westminster University, Taškent, Uzbekistan ABSTRACT The relationship between Central Asia and China constitutes the most important line in the development of the region after the shock of the collapse of the USSR. Chinese interest in Central Asia has been constantly growing since the first days of the independence of the former Soviet republics in the region. Over the three decades since independence, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has become a key partner for Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, to the point that the future developments of these countries are now impossible to imagine outside of their cooperation with Beijing. Deconstructed in their economic bases due, first to the destruction of the integrated circuits with Russia and then to the neoliberal restructuring of their economies induced by the West, the Central Asians have put their atavistic fears towards their great eastern neighbor in the background to seize it as an essential partner to stop the degradation to which the disappearance of Soviet unity condemned them. China has demonstrated great geopolitical responsibility by coordinating its regional action with that of Russia. A growing economic component, linked to the development of the internal regions of the PRC and to the strategy of diversification of the energy supplies. The launch of the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 confirmed the importance of Central Asia for China by adding a vision of global relations, linked to its position as a continental platform through which to interact with the main geopolitical poles of the macro-continent Eurasian. Strategic interests, energy needs and economic growth are closely linked in an overall vision that makes China a decisive player in the Great Game for defining the destiny of the region. This upward dynamic was strengthened first with the upheaval of regional strategic balances resulting from the American occupation of Afghanistan and then with its unreflective abandonment, which pushed the Chinese to deal more with regional security issues. The escalation of the Ukrainian crisis into open conflict adds further challenges, primarily regarding the regional cooperation mechanism with Russia. If this mechanism were to break down, China will have to continue to play a constructive role in defining the balance of central Eurasia, with careful management of the processes that have been put in place. KEYWORDS: New Silk Road, Sino-Central Asian relations, Russian-Chinese relations ORIZZONTI New Thoughts on Defining Classical Geopolitics Phil Kelly Emporia State University, Kansas, USA ABSTRACT As a not well-recognized, and thus, an under-utilized international-relations model, classical geopolitics, in truth, presents an amazingly flexible, extensive, and understandable tool for the study and application of foreign affairs. This neglect needs attention and correction, with geopolitics raised to a recognition appropriate of a useful international-relations technique, equal to other such approaches now enjoying common study and policy insights. The purpose of this article is to explore that premise by drawing a broader portrayal of this model in the hope of raising a new and better understanding of geopolitics. On that path, also, the author will introduce several new thoughts about his defining of the classical model. KEYWORDS: Classic Geopolitics, International-relations Model, Theory of Geopolitics RECENSIONI “American Grand Strategy from Obama to Trump. Imperialism After Bush and China’s Hegemonic Challenge” di Zeno Leoni, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021 Greta Bordin Vision & Global Trends. International Institute for Global Analyses “POWERSHIFT. India-China Relations in a Multipolar World” di Zarawar Daulet Singh, Pan Macmillan Publishing India Private Limited, New Delhi, 2020 Greta Bordin Vision & Global Trends. International Institute for Global Analyses Il potere che sta conquistando il mondo. Le multinazionali dei Paesi senza democrazia di Giorgio Galle e Mario Caligiuri - Rubettino, Soveria Mannelli, 2020. RENATA PILATI Studiosa di Storia delle Istituzioni e della Politica