U.S. President Donald Trump's decision this week to pause military funding for Ukraine and to align his government with Russia further widens the cleavage between the United States and Europe — effectively breaking what has long been known as "the West."

At first glance, many of China's Western critics will see this as welcome news, but it also means that Beijing must navigate in a much more fragmented and turbulent geopolitical environment.

The Paris-based global affairs think tank Institut Montaigne recently published a detailed forecast of the challenges that lie ahead for China over the coming decade. The report's authors, François Godement and Pierre Pinhas, join Eric & Cobus to discuss four scenarios they mapped out that could shape China's trajectory in this new era.

SHOW NOTES:

• Read the Institut Montaigne Report: China 2035: The Chances of Success

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When the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer launched DeepSeek on January 20th, the global AI market for large language model (LLM) systems was turned upside down. Investors dumped nearly a trillion dollars of tech stocks in the U.S., panicked by the prospect that a cheaper, more nimbler alternative would undermine the massive investments that companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple were making in AI.

A month later, those stocks have all largely recovered. Now, as investors have had time to use DeepSeek and better understand what it can do, there's less concern that it'll displace U.S. tech giants. The focus now is on its impact on the rest of the world.

Asia Society Switzerland Fellow John Lee, a veteran Chinese technology analyst, joins Eric to explain why Chinese AI initiatives like DeepSeek along with new innovations in automotive tech are poised to take off in lower-income developing countries.

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At last week's Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi touted his country's 5% economic growth last year as a "benefit to the world" thanks to all of the trade it does with countries around the world.

While countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, among other regions, are no doubt selling more raw materials to China, critics contend, though, that this trade pattern isn't healthy and mostly in China's favor.

This week, Eric, Cobus, and Géraud debate whether Chinese trade is helping or hurting developing countries and whether China's role as the world's manufacturer is also the primary reason why poor countries remain stuck at the bottom of the industrial value chain.

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When Donald Trump criticized Panama for its management of the canal that he claimed had fallen under Chinese control, many people at first thought this was just another round of Trump's usual bluster. But since his election last November, the President has been relentless in pressuring the government in Panama City and shows no signs of backing down until all Chinese entities have been expelled from the canal zone.

Alonso Illueca, an associate law professor at the Universidad Santa María La Antigua and a specialist in China-Panama relations, joins Eric & Cobus from Panama City to discuss the escalating crisis and why the government doesn't have a lot of options to push back against the U.S.

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On Monday, January 20, Donald Trump will take the oath of office and return to power as president of the United States. Trump is promising to overhaul U.S. foreign and commercial policy in what many experts believe will mark the start of a very tumultuous period — not just for the United States but also for countries around the world.

Sarah Shidore, director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute in Washington, D.C. joins Eric & Cobus to discuss the impact of the coming Trump presidency on developing countries and how he expects China to respond.

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China is deeply unpopular in the U.S., UK, Japan, and most other wealthy countries, and given the politics in those regions, there's no indication that's going to change anytime soon. It's a very different story, though, in large parts of developing Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Middle East where public opinion surveys reveal generally favorable views of the Chinese.

A new "poll of polls" by the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) on global public opinion about China reveals a lot more nuance about how people in the Global South feel about their countries' ties with China than what is framed in the mainstream media narratives.

Andrew Chubb, a senior fellow at ASPI, led the project and joins Eric & Cobus to discuss what the data tells us about the diversity of views on China across the Global South.

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2024 will be remembered as a seminal year in China-Africa relations with a rebound of Chinese lending to the continent and renewed diplomatic engagement in the run-up to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit that took place in Beijing.

Africa also emerged again as a centerpiece in the U.S.-China duel as leaders from both major powers visited the continent in 2024.

And while stakeholders in the U.S. and Europe struggle to get their businesses to see the opportunities available in Africa, Chinese firms have no such concerns as they expanded their presence this year in the mining, telecom, and automotive sectors.

In this year-end double episode, Eric, Cobus, & Géraud share their top three China-Africa stories of 2024 and provide a forecast for what to expect in the year ahead.

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A few months ago, China looked like it had all its Mideast diplomacy figured out. Israel and the U.S. were taking heavy hits in the court of global public opinion over the devastation caused by the war in Gaza.

Each harrowing image of Palestinian civilians enduring unimaginable suffering steadily undermined U.S. and Israeli claims that their war against Hamas was justified. Beijing eagerly criticized Washington’s hypocrisy in championing universal human rights—except when it came to Israel, the U.S. military, and other selective American interests.

But now that Israel has decapitated Hamas' leadership in Gaza and Hezbollah's in Lebanon, and with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad now exiled to Russia, the geopolitical landscape in the region looks very different.

Tuvia Gering, a longtime China-Israel analyst and a cyber threat intelligence analyst at the Tel Aviv-based cyber security start-up Planet Nine, joins Eric & CGSP Middle East Editor Jony Essa to discuss how China's position in the region is seen from Israel.

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