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The rise of China is seen by some observers as a precursor of inevitable hegemonic competition in East Asia. At the very least, it seems likely that China's influence in East Asia will grow at the expense of the United States. Whether this will eventually amount to a form of hegemonic transition is far less clear. It is, therefore, an opportune moment to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of China and the US in East Asia. This paper suggests that the nature of hegemonic competition and transition is more uncertain and complex than some of the most influential theoretical understandings of hegemony would have us believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on social, political, and cultural events in China related to both internal developments and foreign relations. Topics discussed include discouraging independent candidates from participating in elections, a crackdown on the illegal use of non-edible materials in food and violations of food safety, incidents of social unrest and protest, and efforts to curtail inflation in Chinese economic policy. Other topics include severe drought conditions, the detention and release of artist Ai Weiwei, and the detention of Christians in Beijing, China.

The article presents a chronicle of events related to internal developments and the foreign relations of China for July-September 2010. Internal developments discussed include central government appointments, military exercises in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea, and growth of the gross domestic product (GDP). International developments include visits to China by South African President Jacob Zuma, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a collision between a Chinese fishing boat and a Japanese patrol boat, and China's opposition to European Union (EU) sanctions on Iran.

A multi-levelled hegemonic encounter has developed in Central Asia, in which a global hegemon, the USA; a regional hegemon, the Russian Federation; an aspirant sub-regional hegemon, Uzbekistan; and an emergent regional and global hegemon, China, co-exist within the framework of Central Asian security politics. Where these hegemons? interests do not conflict this can be characterised as a matrioshka model of hegemony: the different level hegemons can accommodate one another peacefully and where their interests coincide they can form alliances. The model of multi-levelled hegemony developed here highlights the simultaneous presence of competition and cooperation. This article explores the way in which the various bilateral hegemonic relations in the region also indicate that actual and emergent hegemonic states at different levels can cooperate as hegemonsin order to challenge, or to respond to challenge, by hegemonic states at other levels. This helps to clarify the question of whether the increasingly competitive interaction between these states is likely to lead to conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While China has been portrayed as a reluctant supporter of UN peacekeeping in the past, it has voted in favour of every newly established UN peacekeeping operation since the beginning of the new millennium. Previous studies of China's behaviour in UN peacekeeping explained this phenomenon primarily with recent shifts in its foreign and security policy rather than with changes in UN peacekeeping itself. This article analyses China's voting behaviour in the UN Security Council on peacekeeping resolutions in the context of the evolving concepts of UN peacekeeping. It argues that China's recent enthusiasm for these missions is the result of two developments. On the one hand, Beijing was able to reinterpret its understanding of UN peacekeeping after its experience in the 1990s, especially with regard to the use of force; while on the other hand, the way UN peacekeeping missions are conducted was reformed after the Brahimi Report in 2000, which made UN peacekeeping more agreeable to the China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]