LESS than a week after the biggest shuffle of China’s leaders in a decade, the prime-minister-in-waiting, Li Keqiang, set tongues wagging with a speech about the country’s economic development. A government news-agency gushed that if his words could be summed up in four syllables, they would be “reform, reform”; if in six, then “reform, reform, […]
China’s growth has slowed a bit this year, but the surge in vivid predictions about the country’s future continues to amaze observers. This observer, at any rate. Experts foresee imminent financial collapse or an uninterrupted rise to economic preeminence. The ruling Communist Party will either loosen or tighten its grip. The consequences for the U.S. […]
What comes next for China’s ambitious Dalian Wanda Group, one of the country’s largest entertainment and commercial real estate companies? Fresh on the heels of its September $2.6 billion acquisition of AMC Entertainment, the Beijing-based private company plans to buy a British business early next year (more details to come on whether it will be […]
There are many challenging numbers confronting China‘s new leaders, but two are especially stark. China has 20 per cent of the world’s population, but only nine per cent of the world’s farmland. And even that imbalance in the amount of land available to produce food for an increasingly demanding population of 1.3 billion is getting worse […]
A lot of attention has been paid in recent years to energy-hungry China’s billion-dollar bids on oil fields in Canada and the Asian giant’s reliance on oil from countries like Iran and Sudan to fuel its growing economy. But its growing interest in another major oil producer has gone largely unnoticed, and if current trends […]
When nations become strong and their companies begin to spread business to other countries, interests are bound to either collide or come together. For decades, it was the turn of the Western multinationals to face political wrath in faraway countries. Remember India threw out Coca Cola and IBM? Now it is the turn of Chinese and […]
Is the People’s Republic of China (PRC) trying to implode the Japanese economy? It is starting to look that way. The PRC has counterprogramed the US pivot to Asia – and US advantages in military and softpower – by leveraging its economic strengths. When Japan kicked off this year’s edition of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Follies […]
How does China’s new leader see the world, and how will he handle the country’s foreign policy? Do his style and preferences differ significantly from those of his predecessor, Hu Jintao? The answers will determine China’s relations with the world, and vice versa, for the next decade. China’s leaders approach power in a very different way […]
There is the veneer of authority in a map. A splotch of color bordered by cold, static black lines is the world as it is and as it is for all. Maps, however, are an abstraction of reality. We see the world in a particular way and so we splash this vision onto the page. […]
Chinese tourists may be flocking to Europe in record numbers, but now they can see some of the continent’s top historical attractions without ever leaving the People’s Republic. The Alpine village of Hallstatt, Austria, (a UNESCO World Heritage site on the picturesque shore of the Hallstätter See) has been re-created in full-scale replica in Boluo, in southern China. Complete […]
looking beyond borders 