When Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping meet in Beijing this week, they will try to reverse the downward spiral in relations between their two countries. There is a growing sense that a promising partnership, one that was captured by the agreement to forge a “new type of major country relations,” has lost its momentum and threatens to run off the rails.
Two Asian leaders who planned to meet at the APEC meeting in Beijing actually did just that: on November 10 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping met for a short but nonetheless symbolically very important encounter. During their reportedly not exactly ‘warm-hearted’ encounter, Abe and Xi reportedly agreed to make efforts to work on maritime crisis management in order to prevent further Japanese-Chinese maritime clashes in disputed territorial waters in the East China Sea.
In recent months relations between Russia and the European Union reached their lowest point since the end of the USSR. This fact, as clear as it is problematic, formed the departure point for the workshop titled “European-Russian Dialogue. From Damage Limitation to Renewed Engagement” held on October 13 in Rome in the context of events being held during the Italian semester of presidency of the European Union.
Argentina has defaulted again, thirteen years after its last and catastrophic financial collapse (2001). At the time, its economy shrank by 11% in one year (2002) and inflation rose above 40%; now, however, things look quite different and the Argentine government, much more optimistic. What has happened? At least three factors can be singled out.
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Where is China under its (relatively) new president Xi Jinping heading to politically and economically? That question is as open as ever and those analysts and observers who over the last two years sought to make predictions on Beijing’s preparedness to adopt economic and political reforms, have come to realize that China’s political and economic policymaking processes remain too opaque and non-transparent to make predictions which go beyond guess-work.
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Xi Jinping's first year in power has been all about signalling the challenges to the party's grip on power and indicating how these challenges might be met. Despite a change in emphasis, these challenges have long been established and identifying them is not the same thing as solving them.
Shaun Breslin, is Director of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at The University of Warwick, where he runs a large EU funded project on the EU in a multipolar world.
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