Executive Summary: In 2025, Beijing has intensified its approach to Taiwan across legal, military, discourse, and political dimensions. In October, a local public security bureau opened investigation into a sitting Taiwanese lawmaker for the first time, enhancing its legal warfare tactics against the democratic state.... MORE

Executive Summary: The Global Governance Initiative (GGI), announced by Xi Jinping at the 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit, marks a strategic evolution from sectoral cooperation to competition for global governance leadership. It critiques the so-called “global governance deficit” (全球治理赤字), which lead to the underrepresentation... MORE

Executive Summary: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has launched a new “clean and bright” campaign that redefines online frustration over youth unemployment, gender conflict, and social anxiety as “negative energy” that threatens People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) national security. Expressions that contradict the Party’s... MORE

Executive Summary: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) closely studies the Russia–Ukraine conflict, viewing Ukraine’s innovative use of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) as a transformative model for future naval warfare and asymmetric operations. Chinese analysts emphasize the cost-effectiveness, mass-producibility, modular flexibility, and stealth of USVs, framing them as... MORE

Executive Summary: Growing investments by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in liquefied natural gas (LNG) and pipeline infrastructure are increasing its geopolitical influence in energy markets. PRC LNG re-exports have increased dramatically from 2022, with re-exports surging nearly 770 percent in 2024. Recent progress... MORE

Executive Summary: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using the 80th anniversary of Taiwan’s retrocession to push a revisionist history, formally designating it as a national holiday, and framing 1945 as the legal return of Taiwan to China to strengthen its sovereignty claims over Taiwan.... MORE

Executive Summary: Judicial cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Nigeria confirm that citizens from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are active in both resource extraction and digital offshore laundering networks, connecting illicit resource economies and stablecoin settlement into value chains... MORE

Executive Summary: Military procurement documents show that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is adopting homegrown artificial intelligence (AI) systems like DeepSeek to accelerate its shift toward “intelligentized warfare.” PLA experts describe DeepSeek not as a single product but as an evolving system architecture. They envision... MORE

Executive Summary: The maiden Arctic voyage of the Istanbul Bridge from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the U.K. via Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR) halved transit time to 20 days, signaling potentially growing PRC–Russian cooperation in Arctic trade corridors. Despite the advantages of... MORE

Executive Summary: Georgian officials and PRC diplomats present the PRC–Georgian strategic partnership as a path to Georgia’s prosperity, but reality shows minimal PRC investment in Georgia, trade imbalances that benefit Beijing, and PRC companies winning lucrative state contracts in Georgia. Beijing consistently abstains or opposes... MORE