A US-Taiwan free-trade deal and a second battlefield on EU border after Ukraine-Russia war: Chinese data miners on how Year of the Tiger could pan out

More US sanctions on Chinese tech and a widening of the Ukraine crisis to Belarus and Poland are among scenarios foreseen by researchers at a Beijing university

The team came to their conclusions after sifting through 70 million entries in a global database of events and macroeconomic data. Some of their findings are startling

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A Russian army service member fires a howitzer in the southern Rostov region of Russia. Photo: Reuters

Published: 6:00pm, 1 Feb 2022Updated: 1:02pm, 2 Feb 2022

A free-trade deal between the United States and Taiwan, expanded US sanctions on Chinese tech companies and a “second battlefield” opening up on the Belarus-Poland border after a Russia-Ukraine conflict.

These are some of the startling scenarios put forward by a crack team of Chinese researchers that spent months mining media data bases to predict what would be the 10 most significant conflicts and crises in the year ahead.

After weeks monitoring the political situation in flashpoint countries, the team of a dozen graduate researchers from Beijing Normal University, led by Professor Gao Jianbo, sifted through 70 million entries and downloaded 30GB of data from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone Macroeconomic Data before coming to their conclusions.

Not surprisingly, US-China relations featured heavily in the scenarios considered by Gao’s team, who hope eventually to compete with research bodies such as the International Crisis Group. “The US does not want to be overtaken by China,” said Gao, who said Washington would use ideological differences to unite Western countries in trying to curb Beijing’s rise.

However, the research also looked at problems from Afghanistan to the African continent, as well as what might happen to military regimes that had seized power recently in Sudan, Mali and Myanmar – where Gao said the junta was “unlikely … to resort to further bloodshed, but neither will it restore democracy”.

Here are the 10 scenarios analysed by Gao’s team.

US-China relations

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