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There is a growing view that the emerging brand of Chinese regional diplomacy in recent years is increasingly assertive. This article attempts to make better sense of this perceived more forceful Chinese diplomacy. It argues that Chinese regional behavior is more profitably understood through the lens of a two-pronged foreign policy strategy that combines two particular aspects. One is a tougher and more uncompromising approach toward issues that China regards as concerning its core interests. The other is a more flexible and cooperative position toward interests that, while significant, are of secondary importance. KEYWORDS Assertiveness; China's regional strategy; Asia 'There is one basic difference among us,' China's then foreign minister Yang Jiechi bluntly pointed out to his Southeast Asian colleagues at the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi, 'China is a big country and you are smaller countries.' 1 These words have been evoked to highlight the emerging brand of Chinese regional diplomacy that is being perceived by many observers as 'newly' or increasingly assertive. Other often cited examples of this purported assertiveness, particularly in Asia's maritime spaces, include: Beijing's unilateral declaration of a Chinese Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea (ECS); its continuing occupation of the disputed Scarborough Shoal; the recurrent harrying of Vietnamese and Philippine boats by Chinese paramilitary vessels; and its expansionary activities in contested areas of the South China Sea (SCS) entailing installation of military weapons and infrastructure. These actions have led scholars to wonder whether there has been an assertive 'turn' in Chinese foreign policy. 2

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The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been touted as the centrepiece of China's Belt and Road Initiative and the key to its strategic partnership with Pakistan. Notwithstanding claims about the CPEC's economic potential, however, Islamabad's economy continues to be dire. This article attempts to better understand the ramifications of Pakistan's economic viability and its consequences for China. It does so by examining China-Pakistan relations from the lens of Pakistan's civil-military relations, paying attention in particular to what the Pakistan Armed Forces (PMA)'s domestic dominance means for China's interests, including economic interests, in Pakistan. We suggest that PMA preponderance and its attendant influence on the country's economic performance bring another dimension to interpreting Sino-Pakistani relations. As Beijing's most trusted political partner in Pakistan, the PMA's local dominance has considerable benefits for China, particularly in the security and political aspects of its interests. However, this dominance also entails a number of complications for Chinese economic interests, a factor that has implications for the future of China's CPEC investments and their financial sustainability. KEYWORDS China; Pakistan; China-Pakistan relations; Pakistan Armed Forces; China-Pakistan economic Corridor; Chinese investments The extant literature has rightly demonstrated the salience of geo-strategic and security factors-in particular, shared concerns about India-in anchoring relations between China and Pakistan (see, for example, Small 2015; Garver 2001). Pakistan's adversarial relationship with India is well-known, an 'intractable rivalry' rooted in the contentious partition of 1947 and fuelled by a host of factors including religious and identity differences, terrorism and a bitter territorial dispute over Kashmir (Fair 2014). Many Pakistani elites, rightly or wrongly, see India as an 'existential threat' ('Pakistan obsessed,' 2019). These reasons principally inform why, for Islamabad, its relations with Beijing have always been its top strategic priority: China acts as its primary external balancer against India as well as security backer. Notably, China had provided considerable assistance to help Pakistan become a nuclear weapon state, and is today its main arms supplier (Boon 2018, 35). Beijing, for its part, perceives India as a security and strategic concern in its western periphery, especially after their 1962 border war. 1 This threat perception has persisted

The notion of strategic ambiguity has long guided the United States’ engagement in cross-strait relations, requiring that Washington is intentionally unclear about whether and how it would intervene in a China-Taiwan conflict in order to preserve a balance of assurance and deterrence for both sides. This article unpacks the US approach to strategic ambiguity under Trump. Adopting a neo-classical realist perspective, it argues that domestic and individual level drivers-in particular, US populism, Congress and the foreign policy establishment, and Trump's transactional and personalized approach to foreign policy-have interacted with the shifting US-China balance of power to produce a different mode of American strategic ambiguity in the Taiwan Strait. A common view is that as a function of the growing US-China power competition, the US has largely leaned towards Taiwan in recent years. Our analysis revises this assessment by revealing a form of strategic ambiguity under Trump that, despite appearing to upset the balance of ambiguity in favour of Taiwan-paradoxically and probably unintentionally-maintains assurances and warnings for both China and Taiwan. Yet, while Trump has arguably preserved the overall balance of strategic ambiguity, he has introduced greater volatility into cross-strait relations.