From Pandemic Diplomacy, Mainlandisation of Hong Kong to the Embattled Belt and Road Initiative: The Enigma of Communist China's Superpower March

ABSTRACT

Next, moving from CCP's Hong Kong geogovemance issue - which also involves direct policy impacts on its Taiwan policy, crossStrait relations as well as domestic ruthlessly suppressed civil society's rights-defending and pro-democracy movement - to international geoeconomic and regional geopolitical calculus, Tiago Luis Carvalho and Carla Guapo da Costa's article, "China's Geoeconomic Strategy The Case of State Grid's European Investments", and Khadijah Md Khalid and Muhammad Daniai Azman's "In the Dragon's Tight Embrace? A Neo-Gramscian Perspective on Malaysia's Foreign Policy towards China" respectively analyse how China's State Grid, a transnational State-owned enterprise, can be an instrument of the Chinese geoeconomic strategy, and the hegemonic forces at play in the business-ruling elite nexus, resistance to Malaysia's attempted foreign policy recalibration towards China after the Southeast Asian nation's game-changing 2018 election, the interplay between domestic and international distinctions, as well as the formal and informal individual agency in various dimensions of bilateral ties. While Carvalho and da Costa from Universidade de Lisboa (University of Lisbon), Portugal, draw our attention to the fact that despite the important economic gains that can be capitalised from SG's investments, such investments entail geopolitical effects that might collide with host countries' political and economic security, Khadijah and Daniai from the University of Malaya, Malaysia, based on their investigations into various Belt and Road projects in Malaysia and scrutiny on the China policy of the Najib administration, urge for the need to probe the dimensions and diffusions of power in state-society relations, variations between authoritarian regimes, and concealed business deals among policymakers in studying Malaysia-China relations, while acknowledging the significant impact of the interplay between domestic forces on foreign policy. The CCP regime's global ambitions are again the subject of investigation after the next paper on Hong Kong by Jason Cheung that has been discussed above - this time in a country case study "China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Energy Projects China's Strategy and Implications for Pakistan" by Hidayatullah Khan from Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering, and Management Sciences (BUITEMS), Balochistan, Pakistan, and the University of Malaya's Geetha Govindasamy, member of the Malaysian Association of Japanese Studies (MAJAS) and the Malaysian Scholars on Korea (MASK) Network, and Korea Foundation and Sumitomo Foundation grant recipient, and Md Nasrudin Md Akhir, founder of the Malaysia-Japan Research Centre, co-founder of the Malaysian Association of Japanese Studies and the Japanese Studies Association in ASEAN, and recipient of the Emperor of Japan's Order of the Rising Sun. The second section of this focus issue, From SCO, BRI to SÂRS-CoV-2 Cooperation or leverage?, covers the PRC's engagement with strategic and trade partners through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - the Eurasian political, economic, and security alliance established in 2001 whose membership consists of China and Russia plus four Central Asian post-USSR republics (thus earning the rather unflattering description of "The League of Authoritarian Gentlemen"1 from some observer) with India and Pakistan joining later in 2017 - and Xi Jinping's signature Belt and Road Initiative, and traces the CCP regime's attempt to shrewdly capitalise for diplomatic gain on a deadly global novel coronavirus pneumonia pandemic that was ironically caused by its mishandling of the original Wuhan outbreak through its usual suppression of information flow, persecution of whistle-blowers and citizen-reporters, and manipulating world bodies - in this case the World Health Organization - with its newfound strong global influence.