Show Notes
The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the 14th Dalai Lama, marked his 90th birthday earlier this month with an announcement that his successor as Tibetan Buddhism’s most senior religious figure would be a reincarnation, to be identified after his death by the staff of his office in Dharamsala in northern India — where he has lived since fleeing Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule. The announcement is likely to set up a clash with Beijing, which says it alone has the righ...
More from China In Context
Chinese electric vehicle brands may not yet be on everybody's roads, but they're certainly on the minds of policy makers around the world. With Donald Trump musing recently on whether to allow Chinese cars to be manufactured in the US, leading American auto industry figures have pushed back, arguing that the subsidies China has given its EV and battery firms over the past two decades amount to unfair competition. The head of Volkswagen, meanwhile, has warned that French and German carmakers m...
September's summit meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping may not have achieved too many concrete outcomes, but to some observers, it highlighted China’s rising international status. Beijing's ambitions on the international stage have been highlighted in recent years by its launch of a series of Global Initiatives, on Governance, Security, Development and Civilisation, which emphasise its own values, and have fuelled fears among some in the west that China seeks to replace the US as the ...
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this month comes amidst continuing tensions over Beijing’s strategic ambitions, US arms sales to Taiwan, and restrictions on US chip exports to China. Congress has just passed a bill pledging sanctions against countries which, like China, import Russian oil, while Donald Trump’s recent Greenland deal seems targeted at both Beijing and Moscow. So what are the chances of the two countries extending the truce on trade tariffs they reached last y...
Despite decades of rapid Chinese growth, it’s over the past year that European politicians have begun to talk of facing what’s been dubbed the ‘China Shock 2.0’ — as surging Chinese exports and the impact of higher technology Chinese growth increasingly affect the heartlands of European industry — particularly German car and machinery manufacturing. Germany’s industrial output has fallen around 10% since 2022, and the country is estimated to be shedding some 10,000 industrial jobs every month...
There’s been much talk recently about China’s demographic challenges: a fast-ageing population, a fall in the number of marriages, and record low birth rates - despite the relaxation of the One Child Policy ten years ago - as well as a rise in divorce rates over the past two decades. So what is going on in Chinese families and relationships? One person who studies this in great depth is Liu Jieyu, professor of sociology and China Studies at SOAS, and co-editor of the journal the China Quarter...