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BEIJING — If there’s one thing that gets discussed a lot regarding China’s relationship with Sudan, it’s the oil interest.

As the world’s largest energy consumer and one of the fastest-growing economies, China needs oil.  Since 1995, it has invested heavily in Sudan’s oil infrastructure via the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

“We cannot exaggerate the importance of Sudan oil to the whole of China’s oil input,” said Dr. He Wenping of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Sudan isn’t China’s leading supplier in Africa; that honor more recently has gone to Angola.  But Sudan does supply roughly seven per cent of the mainland’s oil needs.

In return, Beijing has provided military support — most visibly in the form of weaponry — to Khartoum.

The oil-for-arms relationship provoked a huge international outcry in relation to the Darfur conflict.  Western governments and human rights groups called on China to stop supplying small arms to Sudan (although Russia was just as, if not more, culpable) and to use its leverage with Sudan to end the wholesale mass killings.

But what’s more interesting than simply China’s oil interests in Sudan is the way in which those interests are affecting Beijing’s foreign policy.

Liu Jin / AP

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, center, arrives at Beijing International Airport on Tuesday.

Wither non-interference?
Despite Beijing’s adherence to the non-interference principle (one of five which have guided diplomacy under the People’s Republic of China since 1954), the Chinese leadership has actually taken small steps away from its longstanding standard.

“The global business activities of Chinese firms are heightening domestic and international pressures on the Chinese government to protect Chinese assets and citizens abroad and to help resolve international crises,” writes Erica Downs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

Sudan is a textbook case.  (Libya is another stark example — as our bureau chief, Eric Baculinao, wrote about last week.)

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir embarked on a four-day visit to China on Tuesday, despite global censure.  There are, after all, two international warrants for his arrest on charges of genocide and war crimes.

But the Chinese argue that Bashir’s arrest could further destabilize the region and that keeping diplomatic channels — and its doors to the Sudanese president — open is key.  “If you couldn’t even have any dialogue with the sitting president of this country, how can you guarantee peaceful transition, especially now the south Sudan is going to get its independence,” said He.

Beijing has good reason to want a lasting peace between north and south following the latter’s secession on July 9.  Much of the oil lies in the impoverished, underdeveloped south.

But transporting the oil out requires the use of what little infrastructure exits in the north, including a key pipeline.  Not to mention the fact that China has invested so much in the north and in its relations with Bashir, who’s expected to brief Chinese President Hu Jintao Wednesday on the latest situation. 

Although his arrival to Beijing was inexplicably delayed by a day, Bashir told the state-run Xinhua news agency that relations between the two sides would not be weakened by the south’s imminent independence.

Perhaps another indication of “pragmatism” at play, the Chinese government is sanguine about its apparent reversal on the non-interference principle. 

Last week, its special representative for African Affairs, Liu Guijin told reporters that China was using “a new form of diplomatic engagement” to work with north and south Sudan.

By Jim Maceda, NBC News correspondent

MANILA, The Philippines — You may not have noticed, with all the news on our limping economy, the 2012 presidential race, the war in Afghanistan and increasing violence in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, but this has been a pretty good stretch for the rule of law. And the message seems to be, ”Ignore me at your own peril.”

Sources close to Moammar Gadhafi’s family tell NBC News that Gadhafi’s son, Saif al Islam – known in the West as the regime’s “face of reform” – is ready to break with his father and surrender to the International Criminal Court. In May, an ICC prosecutor asked for arrest warrants for Saif and his father on charges of crimes against humanity for the alleged crackdown on anti-Gadhafi protesters, from Benghazi to Tripoli. These sources say Saif has decided that he’d rather defend himself before the ICC than risk being killed by NATO airstrikes. Saif al Islam claims he’s no war criminal and apparently still hasn’t figured out how to leave Libya and turn himself in. Nevertheless, chalk up a plus for the rule of law.

And even as the fighting season in America’s war in Afghanistan has revved up for an 11th time, a few green shoots of justice are even showing there. True, the top Afghan leadership seems as Teflon-like as ever to the workings of the courts. But the rule of law is on the attack. The largest – and longest – counternarcotics interdiction ever launched by U.S. law enforcement agents and their Afghan partners – code-named “Operation Strangle” – has destroyed dozens of drug labs and tons of narcotics, and arrested dozens more drug traffickers. The monthlong offensive in Helmand and Kandahar, the very heart of the drug zone, began in mid-May and is now winding down. It was specifically geared to “shake the tree,” according to Agent “J,” a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official based in Kabul who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said the operation was timed to take place AFTER the poppy harvest so as not to hurt farmers who still depend on the illegal crop to feed their families. In this way, J said, the REAL criminals – often the Taliban themselves – who fuel the drug trade in Afghanistan became the primary targets in a series of interagency raids, not just the “pinpricks” of the past.

Meanwhile, with surge forces still in place, the number of counternarcotics personnel has almost quadrupled – from 150 in 2009, to more than 550 today. Mostly importantly, J believes that the DEA and Afghan officers now have the resources to build up solid cases against traffickers in court. That might not only put drug lords behind bars, but keep them there. And strong prosecutions, he said, would make presidential pardons of influential drug lords – something that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has favored in the past – much more complicated. “We’ve been active with raids and arrests in the field for some time, but we’ve never been able to deliver the final phase – that of exploiting the Afghan judicial process,” said J. Referring to the NATO goal of handing over the lead in the fight to the Afghans by 2014, he added, “we’ve got about 3 years to make the rule of law work. But we’ve already made counter-narcotics the highest US priority it’s ever been here.”

There has even been progress in the former Yugoslavia, a land where strongmen with private armies carved out their fiefdoms in a civil war driven by fear, and revenge for events that had happened centuries before. After 16 years on the lam, there he was live on Hague TV for all to see: the so-called “Butcher of Srebrenica.” Old and frail, the former general was still Ratko Mladic, appearing at times defiant – but BEHIND thick glass in one of the Hague’s musky courtrooms. And then this … only yards away, his blood brother in Serb extremism, Radovan Karadjic, was busy defending himself against charges that could keep him locked up for life.

The scene was as surreal to me as the living nightmare that was the siege both men had allegedly engineered. Sarajevo. The headless, convulsing bodies in pools of blood after a mortar hit an outdoor market; an old man trying to peel bark from a barren tree with the hope of a bark soup meal; the sea of wailing Bosnian Muslim women – all separated from their husbands or sons in Srebrenica – and whose stories of rape and murder made my hand shake as I wrote them into my notebook. I lost friends and colleagues in that mayhem. And as it unfolded over 3 1/2 years, I couldn’t imagine how such horror would ever end. Nor did I believe I’d ever see the accused brought to justice. But 16 years later, all of the “Big Three” were either pacing behind bars or, in the case of the late Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, had died there.

A long-forgotten anecdote came to mind. It was July 1995 and the legal minions at the International Criminal Court in the Hague were spilling A4 paper on the floor as they ran through its corridors with the freshly released and Xeroxed Mladic indictment. Genocide and crimes against humanity topped a long list of charges, all related to Mladic’s alleged role in the tearing apart of what was Bosnia-Herzegovina. As he handed me a thick copy of the indictment, Deputy Chief Prosecutor Graham Blewitt had a glint in his eye. “But what are the chances you’ll ever bring Mladic to trial?” I asked. I knew full well that the Big Three were accused of the worst European atrocities since World War II, but were either in hiding or – in Slobo’s case – still in power and immune. A sharp if unassuming technocrat, Blewitt slipped his UN blue-covered indictment copy between folders that read “Karadjic” and “Milosevic” on a shelf holding dozens of other war crimes cases – none of which, at that point, had come to trial. Today, all but one has. “That doesn’t depend on me,” he finally said. “That depends on the rule of law.”

So what do a Serb general, the son of Libya’s dictator and the DEA have in common? Saif al Islam, Agent J and Ratko Mladic are all examples. The rule of law … flawed … and tedious … has certainly taken its shots. But despite all the chaos and tyranny pitted against it, it’s beginning to grind out some success in unlikely places.

Jim Maceda is an NBC News correspondent based in London. He recently returned from assignments in Libya and Afghanistan, which he has covered since the 1980s.

Ian Williams / NBC News

Rival parties have complained to the electoral commission that portraying politicians as animals is undemocratic. The slogan translates as: “Don’t Let the Animals into Parliament.”

BANGKOK – It’s election time in Thailand and a forest of posters has been planted along the capital’s roads.

The voters of Bangkok spend a good chunk of their time stuck in horrendous traffic, so the 26 competing parties see this as a pretty effective way of getting their message across to a captive audience.

Among the most colorful are a series of placards featuring animals including buffaloes, monkeys, dogs and lizards, all wearing suits. They feature a large caption in Thai, which translates as “Don’t Let the Animals into Parliament”.

The nationalist party behind these posters is urging voters to reject all the candidates and tick a “vote no” box on their ballot papers.

Other parties have complained to the electoral commission that portraying politicians as animals is undemocratic.

Offensive to animals?
But perhaps the most heartfelt complaints have come from Thailand’s vets. A seminar of the Thai Veterinary Medical Association last weekend suggested that the posters areoffensive to animals. “‘Beastly’ posters vex vets,” was the Bangkok Post’s headline.

Nantarika Chansue of Chulalongkorn University’s veterinary science department pointed out that dogs and lizards are incapable of lying, which could not be said of certain parliamentary mammals.

Among the clutter of posters, the others that really stand out are those of Chuvit Kamolvisit, who leads one of the smaller parties.

Ian Williams / NBC News

Chuvit Kamolvisit’s angry posters urge voters to let him fight corruption.

Chuvit was once knows as the “massage parlor king”, as he owned a series of these notorious establishments, the biggest of which are almost industrial-scale brothels. He has re-invented himself as a crusader against corruption, exposing the cart-loads of cash (and payments in kind) he used to make to police and politicians to keep his sex businesses running smoothly. Chuvit appears angry in his election posters, which urge the public to let him fight corruption.

The posters of the two front runners, Abhisit Vejjajiva’s Democrat Party and Yingluck Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai Party, are by comparison, well, rather dull.

Abhisit led the most recent and rather lackluster government. Yingluck is the youngest sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed in a military coup in 2006. From self-imposed exile in Dubai he remains the force behind the party, though his sister has brought a fresh face and some excitement to the campaign. With just over two weeks until the July 3 election, most polls show her in the lead, and there is much talk of Yingluck becoming the country’s first female prime minister.

If, that is, the army allows her.

Deadly military crackdown
The military remains the most powerful beast in the Thai political jungle. Not only did they kick Thaksin out in 2006, but since then they’ve worked hard behind the scenes to undermine his supporters and keep them out of power. Last year’s military crackdown against red-shirted protesters, who support Thaksin, resulted in the deaths of more than 90 people.

If the army were to interfere this time, though, the anger against them might be far greater than in the past.

The election posters may offer clues of this. 

During previous election campaigns, many candidates have been pictured wearing their crisp military-style uniforms. Most government servants (and a good many others in official and semi-official positions) have these. They are common sight at official gatherings, replete with medals for various achievements in public service.

But not this time, not in the current crop of placards.

Thai friends say this might reflect a desire by candidates to distance themselves from the coup-culture, and the popular suspicion of the military.

Something for the top-brass to reflect on next time they find themselves stuck in traffic.