Iran buys 400 missiles from China

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Observing China is the essential newsletter to understand the UK-PRC relationship, explained in the context of global developments.

This image was generated using Artificial Intelligence.

If you’ve been reading the news, or only skimming the headlines over the past few months, you will have seen just how ubiquitous the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seems to be.

Be it semiconductors, Artificial Intelligence (AI), numerous state visits to Beijing, trade wars with Brussels or Washington, it is clear that the PRC is shaping global trends. However, it can still be difficult to discern what powers this ubiquitous presence on the world stage.

Through my analysis, I hope to show that mostly, Beijing does indeed have a strategy linking its global engagement in these sectors, and often that becomes clearest in the developments which do not get the most attention in the headlines.

In the past week, Wang Yi, Foreign Minister of the PRC, has met with his counterparts from Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran, and Pakistan, respectively. He met with them as part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led economic and security organisation positioned as a counterweight to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – an equivalence which members of the SCO vehemently disagree with. Beijing, as I wrote in a recent newsletter, sees NATO as a ‘warmonger’, and itself as a peacemaker.

The SCO continues to morph into something beyond a sinocentric security organisation; as I explain below, it is a forum where Beijing – clearly the most powerful member – can soft-launch its foreign policy strategies to a group of friends before hopefully extending them beyond the bloc in the coming years.

Welcome back to Observing China.