China News & Analysis

States are over-securitizing inputs and under-governing outputs, leaving the most consequential domains of AI power largely unregulated and open to capture.

Copper is a key input for the data centers fueling the AI boom, and copper supply chains are riddled with geopolitical and capital risks. Strong investment will be needed to get ahead of the coming copper squeeze, and the clock is already ticking.

The debacle surrounding the launch of Fable by Anthropic is only the tip of the iceberg of dual-use AI. If effective safeguards are not established, the AI arms race ensures that dangerous models will fall into the hands of bad actors.

Tellurium represents a critical minerals paradox. On one hand, it accounts for a relatively small global market and tends to be understated in quantitative risk modeling. On the other, it remains a critical input in solar and defense supply chains and is subject to export restrictions from China, which remains the dominant force in global tellurium production.

For Washington, Iran’s “Hormuz Safe” scheme is a dangerous proposition, demonstrating that a sanctioned state can build its own maritime financial infrastructure, bypassing Lloyd's, the dollar, and US sanctions simultaneously.

Southeast Asia is not moving towards China. It is moving away from US dependence.

Global labor governance is fracturing, leaving manufacturers caught between competing legal systems that, in effect, force them to choose between maintaining access to the Chinese input networks or Western markets.

Administrations from both sides of the aisle have left US critical minerals supply chains highly vulnerable amid a return to great power politics. But stockpiling initiatives like ‘Project Vault’ suggest that Washington is beginning to remember the old truism that economics and geopolitics are inseparable.

The Iran war is opening strategic avenues for China to strengthen its international and domestic position in a disrupted world order.

Examining the evolution of constitutional “One China” framework, which endures because it accommodates contradictions between Beijing and Taipei without forcing either side to concede – managing tensions while never fully resolving them.

Deepening convergence between China and Russia is beginning to resemble a paradigm shift in global order — not yet a formal alliance, but something potentially more consequential: the gradual construction of a Eurasian strategic sphere designed to outlast American primacy.

It’s not just economics but geopolitics that’s guiding cable infrastructure decisions in the Indo-Pacific, and what’s being decided now will reverberate for decades to come.

Examining the latest developments in the Iran war, a Putin-Xi summit just one week after President Trump came to town, and an expanding Ebola outbreak in the DRC.

Faced with geopolitical setbacks across Eurasia, Moscow is turning to Central Asia - one of the few regions where Russian institutional influence persists in structured form - to solidify its influence amid a shifting global order.

Obscured by a sea of war-related headlines, China is perfecting its domestic sanction-busting apparatus – not for the Iran war of today, but the Taiwan conflict of tomorrow.