Popular News From Popular Sites: With one eye on Washington, China plots its own Asia 'pivot'

Thursday, July 3, 2014

With one eye on Washington, China plots its own Asia 'pivot'

File handout picture of sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington manning the rails as the ship pulls out of Hong Kong By Ben Blanchard BEIJING (Reuters) - The Silk Road, an obscure Kazakh-inspired security forum and a $50 billion Asian infrastructure bank are just some of the disparate elements in an evolving Chinese strategy to try to counter Washington's "pivot" to the region. While Chinese leaders have not given the government's growing list of initiatives a label or said they had an overall purpose, Chinese experts and diplomats said Beijing appeared set on shaping Asia's security and financial architecture more to its liking. "China is trying to work out its own counterbalance strategy," said Sun Zhe, director of the Centre for U.S.-China Relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University and who has advised China's government on its foreign policy. Added one Beijing-based Western diplomat who follows China's international relations: "This is all clearly aimed at the United States." President Barack Obama's pivot - as the White House initially dubbed it - represented a strategy to refocus on Asia's dynamic economies as the United States disentangled itself from costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.




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