Trade numbers for 2012 show that China has become the world’s biggest trader, unseating the United States that has ruled the global trading charts for several decades. It is a momentous shift that is bound to have far-reaching impact on the way Beijing sees itself and the manner it influences geopolitics. As it becomes the […]
Last Wednesday, China’s new leader went looking for advice. “The CPC should be able to put up with sharp criticism, correct mistakes if it has committed them and avoid them if it has not,” said Xi Jinping, referring to the Communist Party of China. “Non-CPC personages should meanwhile have the courage to tell the truth, speak words […]
A few months ago, the eminent Chinese scholar Wang Jisi noted that China had achieved “first class power status” and “should be treated as such.” The current situation with North Korea suggests two responses: There is scarcely a more opportune moment for Beijing to step up to the plate; and be careful what you wish for. Read […]
THE border between Yunnan province and northern Myanmar (formerly Burma) has always been porous. To the people who live in the region, the border is a crooked mark on other people’s maps, an arbitrary boundary snaking its way 2,400 kilometres through rugged and wild terrain. The authorities in Beijing have seen the same land as […]
You’ve pulled a nifty diplomatic hat trick when you convince your main competitor to blame himself for your bad behavior—and to consider canceling his opposition to that misbehavior to mollify you! Yet China might pull off such a feat if it protests so long and loudly against the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia that Washington […]
We can now discern more or less when the catch-up growth miracle will sputter out. Another seven years or so – enough to bouy global coal, crude, and copper prices for a while – but then it will all be over. China’s demographic dividend will be exhausted. Beijing revealed last week that the country’s working […]
As luck would have it, I was in Beijing when word came of China’s apparent hacking of the New York Times. The newspaper says it became the target of sustained cyber-attack immediately after it had revealed the vast fortune – estimated as “at least $2.7bn” – amassed by the family of China’s outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao. Among the […]
We don’t know for sure whether or not the Chinese government was behind the four-month-long campaign of China-based cyber attacks on the New York Times. For what it’s worth, a specialist in Chinese hacking at the Council on Foreign Relations named Adam Segal explains here why analysts tend to suspect Beijing’s hand in the sophisticated and “depressingly ordinary” Chinese […]
On Friday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that income inequality in the country exceeds a warning level set by the United Nations. China’s publication of its Gini coefficient – a widely used measure of economic equity – drew attention for a number of reasons. For one, China has not published its Gini coefficient since 2000. More […]
A recent research report on the growing economic integration between China and North Korea by the minority staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has attracted a bit of media attention. Like most other government documents,this report—titled, “China’s Impact on Korean Peninsula Unification and Questions for the Senate”— languished in obscurity until The Washington Post wrote a […]
looking beyond borders 