Military alliances are always sold as things that produce security. In practice they tend to do the opposite.
The Cold war may be over, but you would never know it from NATO’s April meeting in Bucharest. The alliance approved membership for Croatia and Albania, and only French and German opposition prevented the Bush administration from adding [...]

read more....

Japan’s prime minister said Tuesday that his country and China were close to resolving a dispute over offshore natural gas fields that had become a symbol of rising rivalries between Asia’s two richest nations.
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters that the two sides were close to an agreement on developing a string of natural gas [...]

read more....

Like Su, China is already trying to look ahead after the magnitude-7.9 earthquake. Reconstruction has started, even as the communist government attempts to feed and shelter about 5 million people left homeless by the massive disaster.
Shopkeepers who lost years of investment are plotting how to get their businesses running again. The government’s open response may [...]

read more....

So far so good, but it still takes two to tango and the EU is not making the right moves, Bingran Dai of the Centre for European Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai tells ISN Security Watch.
“The problem is that the atmosphere has changed drastically since 2006 and the Chinese public and the government feel [...]

read more....

Shanghai’s Civil Defense Office recently announced completion of the city’s largest subterranean bunker, spanning an area of over 90,000 square meters, reported Shanghai Morning Post. The massive underground shelter is able to accommodate 200,000 citizens at a time, offering protection from ground-level disasters such as nuclear radiation, poisonous gas releases, or terrorist blasts.
Original article posted [...]

read more....

It has been three decades since China’s one-child policy was introduced as a temporary measure to slow the country’s population growth. But there’s rising opposition to the policy amid criticism that it’s creating another demographic crisis.
The trends are exemplified in the city of Shanghai, which has the lowest birth rate and the highest proportion [...]

read more....

Tehran’s defiant position on its nuclear programme has precluded any significant progress at talks among the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany on how to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis.
The talks hosted by China in the financial hub of Shanghai on Wednesday trailed an announcement by Iranian President Ahmadinejad [...]

read more....

Six member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) held their second round of consultation in Shanghai on Wednesday through Friday to prepare for a joint anti-terror military exercise in 2007 in Russia, according to the Ministry of National Defense.
Representatives of the six countries’ defense ministries participated in the meeting and conferred on a series [...]

read more....