Andrea Ghiselli Profile picture
Assistant Prof at Fudan University. Also @TOChinaHub and @ChinaMedit. Foreign policy analysis / Chinese foreign policy / China-Middle East relations.
Mar 6, 2023 5 tweets 4 min read
For a number of reasons, today seemed like a good day to update my Excel file about Chinese foreign policy stuff.

So, hoping that I have not made any mistake shifting from one page to another, here is the the Chinese (central) budget allocated for diplomacy since 2003. One can have a better sense of what money is spent for by combining the data in the 全国一般公共预算支出决算表 and in the 中央本级支出决算的说明. Much of the state money that is spent on foreign policy comes from the central budget, so the two sources can be combined (I think).
Mar 5, 2023 8 tweets 7 min read
How as Covid-19 impacted on (part of) China's human and economic presence overseas?

A thread!

The number of Chinese workers at the at end of 2021 was the lowest probably since the late '90s.
Unsurprisingly, most of them are in Asia as it has pretty much always been. Yet, the total value of new contracts signed by Chinese companies increased in comparison to 2020.

Interestingly, it was in Asia and the WANA region where business was not that good. Yet, that was amply compensated by the many lucrative contracts that were signed elsewhere.
Mar 3, 2023 5 tweets 5 min read
I've just started to go through this new yearbook and here is a first interesting finding.

Covid-19 had an impact on the operations of Chinese companies in Africa in 2020 but in 2021 they actually had a good year with many new contracts. Ongoing projects also... ImageImageImage ...did not suffer additional disruption (per yearbook definition the turnover value indicates how much work they completed during the year). At the same time, the number of Chinese workers continued to decrease (More local labor chipped in?)
Jun 16, 2019 8 tweets 3 min read
Very important! THREAD BELOW --> Iran, China slam US unilateralism, vow to boost ties middleeastmonitor.com/20190615-iran-… via @MiddleEastMnt Iran became an observer in the SCO in 2005 and applied to become a full member in 2008. China and Russia support that move, in theory, but, in my opinion, China opposed it for a number of reasons: 1) UN sanctions first, 2) do not want to to SCO in anti-US organization, later