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This paper examines US, Japanese, and European political economy approaches to China, and their effect on US-Japan and US-EU relationships. Great powers with a greater security concern in dealing with another major country care more about power while those with less of a concern are preoccupied with calculations for wealth. China's rise and its actions have posed a far greater security challenge to the United States and Japan and are driving the two countries closer together. The political economy game involving China reveals a dominant welfare motive among the advanced market economies. The ambition to transform China politically has diminished. China's integration into the global market makes a relative gains approach difficult to implement. Globalization simply limits the ability of a state to follow a politics-in-command approach in the absence of actual military conflict, which explains why the political economy approaches of the United States, Europe, and Japan are not that different in the scheme of things. China's own grand strategy to reach out to the world to outflank the US-Japan alliance has also contributed to a divergent European policy toward China although there are severe limitations to Beijing's ability to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area (FTAAP) has become a topic of focus since the proposal was first raised in 2004. The present paper considers China's policy towards the FTAAP from a political economy perspective by probing the gains, impediments and concerns for China, and makes judgments based on several possible scenarios. The author argues that from an economic perspective, China would benefit from joining the FTAAP both in a static and a dynamic manner because both its main trade partners and trade barriers in export markets are concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region. However, whether the Chinese Government is likely to support the initiative is largely dependent on certain crucial political and diplomatic elements, including the APEC approach, US-Chinese relations, quality of treaty, sensitive sectors, competitive proposal of alternative and membership of Chinese Taipei. Therefore, if the Chinese Government cannot ratify the ideology and terms of the initiative, or issues that are central to China's interests are not addressed, the FTAAP will only remain a proposal possessing economic possibility in the long run, without political feasibility in the near term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently China has adopted the Belt and Road Initiative as a core component of its foreign policy. An important goal of the initiative is to connect China to major Eurasian and African nations through infrastructure building, including Internet infrastructure. Drawing on the critical political economy tradition to media policies, this article offers a broad overview of the communication and information segment of the initiative, which has so far been undervalued or even overlooked in the existing literature. Based on a two-level document analysis, I argue that a growing and complex alliance has been formed between the state and its homegrown Internet companies in building a "digital Silk Road," with a multifaceted aim to mitigate industrial overcapacity, facilitate corporate China's global expansion, support the internationalization of the renminbi, construct a China-centered transnational network infrastructure, and promote an Internet-enabled "inclusive globalization." The highly dynamic state-capital interplays, however, continue to create tensions and conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]