Tag: China

Written by lookingbeyondborders

As India’s Growth Rates Hit The Buffers, The Poor Are Sinking Beneath A Tide Of Seeming Government indifference to their plight as politicians focus on looking after their cronies. Is it goodbye to the Asian tiger?

India’s remarkable growth figures have, however, successfully masked a far less appealing set of statistics which shows that, despite the success of India’s middle class, when you look at government delivery of basic services to the poor, India has been struggling against being hyphenated less with China than with its more desperate and impoverished neighbours […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Africa’s Big Boom

Africa is undergoing a period of unprecedented economic growth. According to The Economist, six of the ten fastest-growing countries in 2011 were in Africa. Average external debt on the continent has fallen from 63% of GDP in 2000 to 22.2% this year, while average inflation now stands at 8%, down from 15% in 2000. This positive trend […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

China’s Other Power Struggle

As China’s ruling Communist Party prepares for a once-in-a-decade leadership transition next month, it is planning a daunting step – breaking up the monopolies enjoyed by its gargantuan state-owned enterprises. The monopolists have other ideas. One of the most powerful of all Chinese state-owned giants is the power-grid operator, State Grid Corp, led by the politically […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

China Urgently Needs a “Reset” With Africa

The recent crackdown by the Ghanaian government on illegal gold mining put the livelihood of hundreds of Chinese workers in the country at stake. On October 11, when Ghana’s police and immigration bureau raided mining fields in Ashanti province, a security officer shot and killed a 16-year old Chinese worker. More than one hundred Chinese […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Mongolia’s Strategic Calculus

Mongolia has featured prominently in Western media over the past several months as an important strategic partner for the U.S. “pivot” to Asia.  Much of the analysis on U.S.-Mongolian relations has been truncated in that it fails to consider the two states’ relations through the prism of Mongolia’s strategic interests.  The end result is an overly […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

War In The Time Of Trade

Horrible history can make for poor diplomatic and political tiesdoesn’t always make for bad business. India and China are as good an example of this adage, as China and Japan are too. Henry Kissinger’s book On China begins with a fascinating snippet of what is being discussed fiercely in India these days – a border war 50 years […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Global Distress 3.0 Looms as Emerging Markets Falter

The global economy is facing its third major brake on expansion in five years as emerging markets slow from China to Brazil, provoking debate about how much policy makers should respond. Three years after industrializing nations led the world out of the U.S. mortgage meltdown-induced recession, the reliability of the power source is waning as […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Asia Knows How to Get Along With a Bigger China

Preparing for a recent trip to Indonesia last week, I came across an article by Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, the editor of the feisty Indonesian daily Jakarta Post, protesting that the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia seemed too much like an attempt to start a cold war against China, with the help of its neighbors. America’s “economic intentions and wherewithal” in […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

Remembering the White Terror

Chen Shin-chi smiles through his dentures and drops down to the dusty floor of a jail cell to do a push up. He looks up at the crowd watching him, smiles again, and flips on his back to perform sit-ups, his body stretching almost the entire length of the three-by-two-meter cell. In 1968, he lived […]

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Written by lookingbeyondborders

The Textbooks Children Learn From In School Reveal And Shape National Attitudes—And Should Provoke Debate

PARISIANS are in a tizz about capitalism. New Yorkers get stressed about sex. In Seoul and San Antonio, Texas, 11,000km apart, citizens fret about the relationship between humans and apes. What goes into school textbooks—and, even more, what is left out—spurs concern and controversy all over the world. And so it should. Few, if any, […]

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