By Verity Robins.

China has woken up to its drug problem, but it is failing woefully in trying to tackle it. Nestled between two major heroin-producing regions, the Golden Triangle (Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam) and the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran), China has long been a transit path for drugs headed toward the rest of the world. Along an ever-expanding network of routes that lead to China's international seaports, domestic heroin use is soaring. No longer just a transit country, it now has a sizable user population of its own. The rise in domestic heroin addiction has had disastrous social consequences, with an increase in Chinese drug cultivation and organised criminal activity, as well as a rise in intravenous drug use and a spiralling HIV/AIDS epidemic.

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By Thiago de Aragao.

There are those who wanted to discuss which would be most important for Brazilian foreign policy: a visit of Barack Obama to Brazil or a visit by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to China.

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By Dr Tim Summers.

Tim Summers explores recent economic transformation in China and makes the case for greater engagement with the countries less well-known regions beyond traditional investment markets.

Download Engaging with Inland China (290 kilobyte PDF)

By Stephen Minas. Source: The Diplomat

'Egypt Leaves the Internet.' The statement from Internet monitoring firm Renesys was far from the most dramatic headline to emerge from the just-ended standoff between ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and demonstrators demanding an end to his 30-year rule. Indeed, when considering the Mubarak government's systematic repression of its people—protesters attacked by plain-clothes thugs, detainees reportedly tortured, journalists harassed and arrested—an Internet blackout seems almost routine.

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By Stephen Minas.

New FPC Research Associate Stephen Minas analyses the China's evolving approach to climate change negotiations from Copenhagen to Cancun and beyond.

Download FPC Briefing: Crossing the river – China and Climate Change (360 kilobyte PDF)

By Adam Hug, Feng Zhang.

This third paper in the Kazakhstan at a Crossroads series explores some of Kazakhstan's international relationships with the EU, Russia and China.

Download Kazakhstan at a Crossroads: Kazakhstan and the world (360 kilobyte PDF)

By Tim Summers.

FPC Research Associate Tim Summers has written a new FPC Briefing that explores China's response to the shifting dynamics of global power and the implications of this for the rest of the international community.

Download FPC Briefing: Global Shifts and China's Response (170 kilobyte PDF)

By Tim Summers.

New FPC Research Associate Tim Summers gives us his take on China's past, present and possible future as the People's Republic approaches its 60th Anniversary.

Download The PRC at 60– A New Chapter for China? (220 kilobyte PDF)

By Dick Leonard.

This year's EU-China summit, scheduled for 8-9 September, in Helsinki, may well see a determined effort from the EU side to put the relationship on a new footing. Both trade commissioner Peter Mandelson, and his external relations colleague, Benita Waldner-Ferrero, have been conducting fundamental policy reviews which are likely to lead to a proposal to replace the 1985 agreement, which has hitherto governed relations between the two sides.

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By Seema Desai, Seema Desai. Source: OpenDemocracy

China's membership of the G8 could be the emerging superpower's next step, but will it be enough to save the

body from irrelevance?

Download The Next Long March (40 kilobyte PDF)

By Seema Desai, Seema Desai. Source: The Foreign Policy Centre

China and India are frequently mentioned in the same sentence, but little of the frenzied analysis of their phenomenal growth dwells long on how improved relations between these two long hostile countries might add to this. The state visit to New Delhi this month by the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, is probably one of the most significant diplomatic events of the decade so far for India; while in China it was billed as the most important landmark of the year. Yet the potential implications for the global economic and political system are greater still. Closer Sino-Indian economic cooperation would impact greatly on both the developed and developing worlds.

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By Andrew Small, Andrew Small. Source: China Review, Spring 2005

When Yu Yongding made a few remarks about China's holdings of US government debt to a group of students in Shanghai, he could hardly have expected his talk to send the dollar tumbling in the international currency markets. 'It's incredible. I'm just an unimportant academic!' he laughed as I caught up with him at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) before his departure to Switzerland for the World Economic Forum.

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By Joshua Cooper Ramo. Source: Financial Times, 18 February 2005

In 1915, the Austrian scientist Erwin Schrodinger developed a thought experiment to demonstrate the incompleteness of quantum physics when it moves from explaining the subatomic world to the larger systems we can observe with our eyes. Schrodinger proposed putting a cat inside an opaque box wired with a small, poison gas-release system. The gas-release mechanism would be triggered by the state of a particle inserted into a measuring device: a positively charged particle would result in a dead cat, say, while a negative charge would do nothing. But the state of the particle was unknown to begin with.

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By Mark Leonard, Mark Leonard. Source: The Guardian, 11 September 2004

In my local curry house I was greeted like a long-lost friend. A huddle of young waiters gesticulated excitedly towards me. Eventually I realised they were pointing at my bag, picked up during a recent trip to China, and emblazoned with the Chinese script for Shanghai. "You've been to China," they said, "China have just put a man in space - they're taking over from America."

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By Mark Leonard, Mark Leonard. Source: The Guardian, 11 September 2004

By 2020 China will be on the verge of superseding the US as the world's leading economic power. Time for the US to wake up and smell the soy sauce, reckons Mark Leonard.

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By Garry Hindle.

Further to the FPC's recent paper on the EU decision to lift the ban on arms exports to China, the data below give an insight into the value and number of US exports of dual-use technologies to China since 1998.

Download the FPC briefing (90 kilobyte PDF)