Innovation is built upon an ecosystem that takes decades to mature. Yet, China has already made substantial advances in computer science, chemistry, engineering, and robotics, all of which pose a direct challenge to U.S. technological supremacy. However, the U.S. will remain dominant and largely unchallenged in biotech and medicine for the foreseeable future.
China and Myanmar agreed to accelerate several joint infrastructure deals and projects during President Xi Jinping’s historic visit to the country, giving new impetus to commercial relations that have revived under Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Xi visited Myanmar on January 17 and 18, marking the first time a Chinese leader traveled to the Southeast Asian country in nearly two decades and coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the two sides establishing formal diplomatic relations.
Citing a sharp economic slowdown in India and other emerging markets, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Monday lowered growth estimate for the world economy to 2.9 per cent for 2019. Besides, the International Monetary Fund also trimmed India’s growth estimate to 4.8 per cent for 2019, citing stress in the non-banking financial sector and weak rural income growth.
This second cold war, conducted on a teeming planet whose anxiety is intensified by the passions and rages of social media, is only in its beginning stages. The aim, like in the first Cold War, is negative victory: not defeating the Chinese, but waiting them out, just as we waited the Soviets out.
By acting as network architects and administrators, Beijing will be privy to data streams in real-time across a large portion of the world, enabling them to develop influence and power across a number of different matrixes.
The “phase one” trade deal between the United States and China addresses only some of the US government’s concerns, and its remaining demands will be much harder to resolve. But while both America and China have an interest in the success of the open multilateral global trading system, current US policy is undermining that goal.
As to why China and Singapore developed a special relationship can be traced back to the latter’s spectacular economic growth after its independence in 1965. With the exception of three years, Singapore’s economy would grow at an annual rate of over six percent for three decades (and over ten percent for half that time)…That appealed to China, whose communist party in the late 1970s had started a long economic reform process to turn its brand of communism into what would become known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Rising US–China tensions go beyond trade and involve a broad range of issues including strategy, security and values. It’s pertinent to also look at the choices that ASEAN and others are facing in the context of this great power contest, including decisions on economic development and technology.
In this sense, China is acting like the colonialists of old: For nearly a century, Britain, first through the East India Company and then under the Crown, exported its own mediocre men to supposedly civilize the South Asian Raj, contributing to the Empire’s impotence and eventual fall. Today, China is ultimately undermining its efforts to become the globe’s foremost power by shipping abroad its own middling ruralites.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidency has started off predictably and disquietingly. There is no pretence that this time it will not be the Rajapaksa family rule. After Ranil Wickremesinghe stepped down as Prime Minister following the Gotabaya victory, the new president lost no time in appointing Mahinda as the new prime minister of a caretaker government.
