Tag: China

Written by lookingbeyondborders

Indonesia Has Made A Remarkable Economic Comeback. Yet, Its Amazing Growth Is Neither Sustainable Nor Inclusive.

An inconvenient fact is that Indonesia’s economic growth is mainly driven by a commodity boom fuelled by China’s appetite for raw materials and global demand for biofuels. China’s enterprises are building bullet trains while Indian car– and IT-companies compete around the world. Indonesia, all the while, manufactures…essentially nothing. Most international manufacturing companies have moved on to greener […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

The Virtual Middle Class Rises

I ENCOUNTERED something on this trip to India that I had never met before: a whole new political community — India’s “virtual middle class.” Its emergence explains a lot about the rise of social protests here, as well as in places like China and Egypt. It is one of the most exciting things happening on […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Why Is The Chinese Dragon Trembling?

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 […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Japan’s Demographic Disaster

Recently, the Japanese government announced that thepopulation decrease for 2012 is expected to be 212,000—a new record—while the number of births is expected to have fallen by 18,000 to 1,033,000—also a record low.  Projections by the Japanese government indicate that if the current trend continues, the population of Japan will decline from its current 127.5 million […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Australia: The New Saudi Arabia?

Shale gas may be sparking an energy revolution in the United States andpotentially even China , but it has attracted relatively little attention in Australia. All that may have changed with a recent announcement by Brisbane-based energy explorer, Linc Energy. Linc shares surged 24 percent after it told the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on January 23 that its […]

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Why Does China Hack Foreign Media?

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 […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Forget Asia – Time to Pivot to Europe

Don’t look now, but for all the buzz about the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, momentum is building on both sides of the Atlantic for a U.S.-EU free trade agreement that could be at least as consequential in shaping the world order. In fact, considering the messy geopolitical landscape with few […]

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