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.

Full text 

By 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; need help viewing PDFs?)

By 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.

Full text 

By 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.

Full text 

Download the original article (100 kilobyte PDF; need help viewing PDFs?)

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.

Full text 

By 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."

Full text 

By 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.

Full text 

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; need help viewing PDFs?)