If China were to replace the United States in the role of global leader, then its internal reality would shape the outside world, just like that of Britain did and that of America still does. And right now, the internal reality in question is not pretty at all. In fact, China is in the process […]
Chinese local governments are swimming in debt. By official accounts, that debt totals $4.5 trillion. By unofficial estimates, it could be as large as $10 trillion…China has long borrowed heavily to build and then counted on breakneck economic growth to pay it back. The script: Sell vast amounts of land to developers, borrow to subsidise […]
In the absence of international censure, China has stepped up its systematic persecution of Muslims, under the dubious pretense that it is fighting “terrorism” and protecting its economic interests. But more than just an attack on human rights, the crackdown is representative of President Xi Jinping’s totalitarian ambitions. Read Here – Project Syndicate
Brussels has misread Beijing’s global aspirations – there is no grand plan behind Chinese acquisitions of European assets. But, as China becomes a stakeholder in Europe, the continent should adopt a pragmatic strategy to profit from this. Read Here – South China Morning Post
A decade ago, in 2009, the Swedish phone giant Teliasonera set out to build one of the world’s first fourth-generation wireless networks in some of Scandinavia’s most important—and technologically savviest—cities. For Oslo, Norway, Teliasonera made an audacious and unexpected choice of who would build it: Huawei, a Chinese company with little presence outside China and […]
If global leadership is China’s ultimate goal, then does China’s intended leadership style lie within its history? Some experts accept China’s eventual rise to global hegemony, yet history shows that China maintained tenuous control over its neighbours. For this reason, China’s foreign policy aims to incentivise the cooperation of its neighbours through the promotion of […]
China is spending billions in an effort to tell its stories to the world. But the official media’s poor coverage of an explosion at a chemical plant in Jiangsu exposes just how clueless its propaganda officials really are. Read Here – South China Morning Post
The accuracy of China’s official growth statistics is once again in question. Last week, at the annual “two sessions” conference, Premier Li Keqiang announced that China would reduce its 2019 target for GDP growth to between 6 and 6.5 percent—previously, it was “around 6.5 percent.” That same week, a group of Chinese economists published a paper with the Brookings […]
There is no question at this point that the relative sizes of the U.S. and Chinese economy today are much closer than those of Japan and the U.S. in the interwar period. And long story short, underselling the size of the Chinese defense budget and overselling the size of the Chinese economy does tend to […]
The current media-designated “war” between the, investment and technology has, unsurprisingly, revived a previously dormant discourse on differences between “Asian” (here, “Chinese”) vs “Western” (“American”) values that many believe portend the “clash of civilisations” advanced by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1993, and repeatedly embellished by numerous acolytes since. Read Here – South China […]
looking beyond borders 