Executive Summary: Brazil, a strategic partner to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is taking a co-leading role in shaping a regional economic order decoupled from U.S.-centric trade and financial norms. The most consequential outcome of President Lula’s recent visit to Beijing was the signing... MORE

Executive Summary: Beijing has formally escalated its critical minerals strategy by launching a coordinated, multi-agency campaign to enforce full-chain control over rare earth and strategic mineral exports, mobilizing more than a dozen central and provincial agencies to supervise mining, processing, licensing, and export operations. Authorities... MORE

Executive Summary: At Moscow’s 80th Victory Day parade, President Xi Jinping positioned the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a key anti-fascist power alongside Russia, using a selective World War II narrative to legitimize the PRC’s present-day international role and deepen symbolic ties with the... MORE

Executive Summary: April’s Politburo meetings and subsequent policy deployments indicate that Xi Jinping and his fellow Politburo members are scrambling to adapt to a harsher external environment—one marked by persistent U.S. tariffs, accelerating technology decoupling, and slowing global demand. Beijing’s response points toward deeper economic... MORE

Executive Summary: Xi Jinping’s April 30 remarks preview a fundamental shift in the Party’s upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), signaling that national security—not growth—is now the central organizing principle of economic planning. A new “security pattern” will be directly integrated with the “development pattern,” embedding... MORE

Executive Summary: Taiwan is bolstering its deterrence posture through whole-of-society defense resilience drills, involving civilians in readiness activities in part to raise confidence in national defense and drawing on European and Japanese models in the process. The most recent drill included 1,500 participants and tested... MORE

Executive Summary: Taiwan's 2025 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) prioritizes enhancing all-of-society resilience and emphasizes U.S.-Taiwan military cooperation. The document represents a significant improvement over its predecessor in content and clarity but suffers from being a document without consensus: Published by the Ministry of National Defense,... MORE

Executive Summary: Decades of policy support from provincial, city, and district governments underpin the successes of AI firm DeepSeek and five other tech companies domestic observers are referring to as “the six little dragons of Hangzhou.” Since 2019, Zhejiang Province (in which Hangzhou is located)... MORE

Executive Summary: Beijing’s diplomatic rhetoric advocates upholding international rules and norms, but this diverges sharply from both its words to party officials at home and its actions abroad that undermine and violate international laws and institutions. Beijing benefits from an international order in which other... MORE

Executive Summary: The People’s Liberation Army Navy conducted two live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea in February without providing customary notification to Australia or New Zealand and causing at least 49 civilian aircraft to divert course. The Tasman Sea drill was designed to demonstrate the... MORE