Closer economic ties will top the agenda during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visits to Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia this week. However, Chinese mediation in the feud between Tehran and Riyadh is unlikely, say experts.

The Philippines' decision to join China's multilateral development bank marks Manila's renewed effort to befriend Beijing via “economic diplomacy” despite the South China Sea dispute, an analyst said.

Japan said on Saturday it would extend around $6 billion in development aid to Mekong region countries, as China prepares to launch a new institutional lender seen as encroaching on the regional clout of Tokyo and ally Washington. Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam all have strong economic growth potential, and are promising destinations for Japanese exporters.

Tokyo: Japan and South Korea on Saturday held the first dialogue of their financial chiefs in two and a half years, agreeing to improve economic ties despite diplomatic frictions between the two Asian countries. Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso and his South Korean counterpart Choi Kyung-Hwan held a one-day meeting in Tokyo, the first since November 2012 and since conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in December that year.

The creation of the prosaic-sounding Asian Infrastructure Investment Development Bank (AIIB) has landed the biggest blow to America’s superpower status in the post-war era.  Such is the verdict of former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, one of the West's foremost public intellectuals and a man whose voice reverberates around the corridors of the world’s chancellories.  

With the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) coming into operation with the support of UK, France, Germany and such Western states and the BRICS Bank set to start off, China seems to have taken over the International Aid Regime.

where China and Chinese-led institutions such as the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank would promote prosperity across the region. But he was on shaky ground — literally. The Boao Forum where Xi spoke took place in Haikou, capital of China’s island province of Hainan, whose local government, it seems, may not be able to pay its debt this year.

Just a few days shy of China’s end-of-March deadline for founding membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Australia confirmed that it will join the AIIB. Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government announced over the weekend that it had chosen to sign on to join the bank as a founding member, becoming the latest U.S.-allied state to join an institution that some in the United States see as a competitor to U.S.-led international financial institutions, like the World Bank.