China’s annual defense budget is set to double by 2015 and exceed that of all other major Asia-Pacific countries, according to figures from leading defense consultancy IHS Jane’s.

The numbers, which were sent through to me this week, suggest China’s defense budget will soar to $238 billion – more than the next 12 leading Asia-Pacific countries combined, and four times that of second place Japan, which will be spending an estimated $64 billion.

As Rajiv Biswas, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific at IHS Global Insight, noted, Beijing has been broadly able to devote an increasingly large portion of its overall budget towards defense, and “has been steadily building up its military capabilities for more than two decades.”

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Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping and leader in waiting continued his friendlier face of China tour Wednesday and Thursday, delivering a much awaited policy speech in Washington before heading to Muscatine in Iowa, where he visited as a Communist Party official way back in 1985.

The Iowa visit underscores Chinese efforts to present the prospect of a non-threatening future for Sino-U.S. ties, and certainly having visited the United States five times and with a daughter at Harvard, Xi offers the prospect at least of tackling difficulties more smoothly.

But despite the generally good natured visit, his speech at the Marriott underscored some of the tensions that still exist in the bilateral relationship – tensions that won’t be going away whoever is in charge in Beijing and Washington.

I’m not generally what you’d describe as a basketball fan, much less an expert on the sport. But it’s hard not to get a little caught up in the hype around the New York Knicks’ new star, Jeremy Lin.

Sports and Culture blogger John Duerden posed the perfectly reasonable dual questions of how good is Lin, and are four dazzling games too short a period to be judging his success? Well, it may still be too early, but we can now make that five dazzling games.

True, as the New York Times noted this morning, Lin faced a little more manhandling than usual from the Toronto Raptors, spending “a considerable amount of time on his back.”

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Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping officially began his visit to the U.S. Tuesday, and was met with some robust criticism from Barack Obama and especially U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

As I mentioned during Obama’s State of the Union, “fairness” was a common thread on the economy, including concerning trade with China. That was no different earlier today as Obama said the U.S. welcomes China’s peaceful rise, but that it also expects it to play a responsible – and fair – role commensurate with its growing status.

“And so we want to work with China to make sure that everybody is working by the same rules of the road when it comes to the world economic system, and that includes ensuring that there is a balanced trade flow between not only the United States and China, but around world,” he said.

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Xi Jinping, who is expected to succeed Hu Jintao as China’s president during the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership changes in the autumn, has arrived in the United States for a five-day visit.

What do we know about Xi? He was born in Beijing in 1953, and is a native of Shaanxi Province and a leader of the fifth generation of the Chinese leadership. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a hero of the Long March and was one of the founders of the Communist guerrilla movement in the province, but was prosecuted during the Mao era.

Xi has held a number of key leadership roles, including First Secretary of Secretariat of the Chinese Communist Party, secretary of the Party Zhejiang Provincial Committee and secretary of the CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee. He also was the key man behind the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The answer is probably no, despite Chinese microblog Weibo being lit up by the rumor that Kim has been assassinated.

Jo Xu, a writer with the popular China SMACK site, has tweeted that “nothing is verified only report of large number of cars at NK embassy, but rumors like this pop up every other week.”

The most convincing rumors are, of course, the ones that play on genuine concerns, and it’s uncertain how successful Kim Jong-il’s son will be in consolidating power at such a tender age and with no real military experience. So an assassination isn’t completely beyond the realms of possibility.

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In light of Rick Santorum’s surprise hat trick of wins last night in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado, I said I’d take a look at the former Pennsylvania senator’s foreign policy positions. But first I wanted to share some reaction from the Mitt Romney camp.

I spoke with Robert O’Brien, a senior Romney foreign policy advisor, for his take on last night’s results and what it means going forward. He told me that Gov. Romney had congratulated Santorum on his caucus and “beauty contest” wins last night (Missouri’s primary was non-binding), but added that “given the number of primaries ahead, and geographic diversity, the Romney campaign is the only one with the resources and the organization capable of maximizing delegate totals and competing in simultaneous elections across the country.”

“Gov. Romney is the only candidate to have won delegates in every state where a contest has been held and delegates have been up for grabs,” O’Brien told me. “He won resounding victories in New Hampshire, Florida, and Nevada, while also picking up delegates in South Carolina.  He maintains a significant delegate lead over Santorum and Gingrich.  As a result, I’m confident that the governor will enter the Republican National Convention in Tampa with sufficient delegates to win the nomination.”

Wow. Rick Santorum has surprised most analysts by going three for three in tonight’s Republican primary battles, winning in Missouri, Minnesota and – most surprising – in Colorado.

As I noted earlier, he was polling well in Missouri and Minnesota, but Mitt Romney’s team was confident that they would be able to pull out a comfortable win in a state that he won handsomely back in 2008. However, with 92 percent of counties reporting, Santorum has secured 38 percent of the vote, with Romney coming in second with 36 percent.

One thing to remember here is that turnout is way down on the 2008 primaries, which goes back to the point I made in New Hampshire about an enthusiasm gap among Republicans. And although Santorum has actually won half of the eight states that have gone to the polls so far, Romney still has to be seen as the favorite.

Most of my focus on the U.S. presidential campaign foreign policy front has been on Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and obviously Barack Obama. In the case of the Republican candidates, this has largely been because these have been the front runners, and so most likely to influence U.S. policy moving forward (although Jon Huntsman was interesting simply because he didn’t fit the mold of his party).

But each Republican primary contest brings a new flavor of the week, and this time it’s Rick Santorum’s turn. Despite belatedly being declared the winner of first on the calendar Iowa, the former Pennsylvania governor has largely been moving under the radar. But with Romney still struggling to close the deal, despite a thumping win in Nevada at the weekend, the Washington chatter is now of how Santorum might be poised to offer Romney the biggest headache.

Certainly, the Romney camp has started to train its fire on Santorum as three states head to the polls tonight, hoping to do to Santorum what they did to Gingrich in Florida.

There’s an interesting anecdote in former U.N. Under-Secretary General Marrack Goulding's account of his time at the organization. In the book Peacemonger, Goulding writes of a conversation a colleague once had with the Soviet ambassador over his country's regular wielding of its Security Council veto power. The ambassador reportedly said that he had been told: "Casting the veto is like adultery; you worry about it the first time, but after that it's fun."

One can only hope that this wasn’t the state of mind that prompted the Russian veto yesterday of a resolution condemning the violence in Syria, because it was, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted, a “travesty.”

The resolution, aimed at stemming government-led violence that has claimed an estimated 7,000 lives since last March, backed an Arab League plan to try to resolve the crisis through a “Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system…including through commencing a serious political dialogue between the Syrian government and the whole spectrum of the Syrian opposition.”

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