Miloš Kroulík's List: Geopolitické problémy

Geopolitics of China

 

 Arthur Waldron, Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, discussed “China” not as a country or nation-state, or a Beijing-defined concept, but as a world. It is more a Europe than a France: its population is as diverse as Europe’s. The only similarity among its languages is a shared script. Cantonese and Northern Mandarin are more different from each other than are, say, Italian and French. 

The population of Russia is getting smaller and older. In 1992 the country's population was estimated at 148 million; today the number is 145 million. That's an absolute decline greater than that in any other nation during the past decade—and some analysts predict that the number of people in Russia will drop below 100 million by 2050. The number of Russians aged fifteen to twenty-four, though temporarily growing because of high birth rates in the 1980s, may shrink by nearly half over the next fifteen years, because of low birth rates in the 1990s. This will greatly strain a country that is already struggling to cope with a daunting array of security challenges, including controlling the world's longest borders and largest land mass, maintaining the world's largest nuclear arsenal, and reining in one of the world's most serious weapons-proliferation problems.