Until she was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while transiting Vancouver International Airport, the world had not heard of Meng Wanzhou. Now everybody knows that Meng, 48, is the chief financial officer of Huawei and the daughter of Ren Zhengfei, chief executive officer and founder of China’s leading technology giant.
Read Here | Asia Times
Much as peace in Palestine has become less important to the Arab Gulf states’ foreign relations, so too does the Middle East’s silence on Xinjiang suggest that today’s regional governments are willing to compromise on peripheral interests if it means ensuring core ones.
Read Here | The National Interest
The Covid-19 pandemic has not stopped Chinese billionaires from getting even richer. A stock market boom and a flurry of new listings has further boosted their fortunes, according to the latest Hurun China Rich List. The super-rich – with wealth of at least 2 billion yuan (US$300 million) to make the list – added US$1.5 trillion to their collective nest eggs in the past year, equivalent to Russia’s annual economic output.
Read Here | South China Morning Post
The U.S. military is already strapped for resources trying to police the Indo-Pacific, and this is peacetime. If the United States lost a sizable fraction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and affiliated joint forces in a contest in the Taiwan Strait—even a triumphant one—its capacity to retain its superpower standing and preside over the liberal maritime order would be diminished. It could win locally but lose globally.
Read Here | The National Interest
China has now displaced the U.S. to become the largest economy in the world. Measured by the more refined yardstick that both the IMF and CIA now judge to be the single best metric for comparing national economies, the IMF Report shows that China’s economy is one-sixth larger than America’s ($24.2 trillion versus the U.S.’s $20.8 trillion). Why can’t we admit reality? What does this mean?
Read Here | The National Interest
The consequences of the presidency of Donald Trump will be debated for decades to come—but for the Chinese leadership, its meaning is already clear. China’s rulers believe that the past four years have shown that the United States is rapidly declining and that this deterioration has caused Washington to frantically try to suppress China’s rise.
When the last of the big four state-owned Chinese banks listed a decade ago, one could be forgiven for thinking that the age of mega Chinese financial listings was over. After all, with financial services being such a strategic sector for the Chinese Communist Party, who would have thought that the state’s stranglehold over banking and finance could ever be challenged The planned listing of Ant Group explodes that myth and reflects the massive changes which the financial landscape has seen over the past decade or so.
Read Here | The Interpreter
Smack in the middle of its National Day holidays, China unwrapped its own “October surprise.” It was not the news of U.S. President Donald Trump and his wife Melania testing positive for the novel coronavirus. Instead, it was a one-line statement that appeared on the screens of hundreds of millions of Chinese smartphones on Oct. 2.
Read Here | Nikkei Asia
Negative views about China have increased in recent years in many developed countries, most notably Australia, according to a survey by the Pew Research Centre released on Tuesday. The findings come at a time when China has adopted a more aggressive diplomatic approach towards the international community and is locked in disputes with other countries on multiple fronts ranging from trade to military.
Read Here | South China Morning Post
What kind of superpower will China be? That’s the question of the 21st century. According to American leaders such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, China will be a rapacious authoritarian nightmare, intent on destroying democracy itself. Beijing, needless to say, doesn’t quite agree.
Read Here | The Atlantic
