The New Globalisation

Globalisation is supposed to be in retreat. How, then, do you reconcile the following? Since 2005, the number of travellers crossing international borders each year has risen by around half, to 1.2 billion. The number of people using the internet has soared from 900,000 to more than 3 billion. By 2020, their ranks are projected […]

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From The Opium War To The Silk Road

Hahei is an artery that leads to the busy Tianjin port. The port’s vast rail-and-road connected hinterland covers six provinces, including Tibet and Xinjiang, the gateway to central Asia and Europe, as part of the ambitious One Belt One Road (OBOR) connectivity initiative, woven around the ancient Silk Road. In total, Tianjin’s hinterland sweeps across […]

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The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, But Data

A new commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, […]

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Trump’s Pressure On Tech Outsourcers Might Be Paying Off

If President Trump’s rhetoric really is pushing companies to alter their practices, it wouldn’t be the first time he has used the bully pulpit to literally bully businesses into change. In that way, H-1B reform may be playing out in a way not unlike the deal president-elect Trump struck with Carrier, a manufacturer that was […]

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The Bitter Legacy Of The 1979 China-Vietnam War

Almost 40 years after a short yet devastating war launched by China in 1979, there has been not any official commemoration of the war in Vietnam. The fierce fight from February 17 to March 16, 1979, claimed tens of thousands of lives, soldiers and civilians alike, in Vietnam’s border provinces, but the conflict hasn’t received the […]

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Economic Ties Serve As Ballast In China-U.S. Relations

Despite murmurs of prospect clashes between the world’s two trade giants, drumbeats for a China-U.S. trade war are increasingly muted when both sides underscore closer win-win economic cooperation. As the new administration of the United States sent its first cabinet-level official to China for a visit, the messenger echoed a sequence of rapport-building gestures made […]

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