To get a sense of how thoroughly the global digital economy is dominated by the US and China, look no further than a recent list of the world’s most valuable internet-based companies. Eleven of the top 20 are from the US; the remainder are based in China.
Read Here – Boston Consulting Group
In the restaurants and coffee shops at the heart of southern China’s hi-tech powerhouse the main topics of conversation have shifted from industry gossip such as IPOs, mergers and innovations to the trade war with the US and Washington’s campaign against Huawei.
Read Here – South China Morning Post
Also Read – China Mobilises Diplomats To Drum Up Global Support Ahead Of G20
China’s national security issues – from Taiwan to the South China Sea and food security – will be at stake as the United States expands the trade war, according to some of Beijing’s most experienced US hands. Beijing has long claimed that national interests were at the heart of its main differences with Washington in the trade talks but it had not specified them publicly.
Some Chinese diplomats have responded to US moves to blacklist Huawei with accusations the decision was “politically motivated”, others have threatened retaliation, and at least one has posted goofy memes on social media in defence of the tech giant.
The news this week that the U.S. government blacklisted China’s telecommunications giant Huawei from its suppliers was received rather viscerally. It’s “the most insane decision,” the CEO of Huawei’s chipmaking subsidiary HiSilicon said in a memo that went viral on Chinese social media. In its own response, Huawei couldn’t help but scornfully add the words “so-called,” a familiar tic of Chinese state media, before mentioning the dreaded Entity List, the U.S. government blacklist where it now finds itself lumped in with international arms traffickers and Russian oligarchs.
Mr Jack Dorsey might have his political views and Mr Donald Trump might have many twigs to pick with Twitter, but there should not be any argument over who’s the best ambassador and brand builder for the social media platform.
Read Here – ThisDayAndThat
We often forget that the Internet is not as wireless as it seems. Most online data still flow through physical fiber-optic cables laid out across several hundred thousand miles of ocean floor. If a shark were to bite through a cable some or all of the Internet could come to a standstill. These days, however, observers spend less time worrying about underwater fauna than about Russia’s submarines, which have been taking a special interest in ocean-bed cables in recent years.
A decade ago, in 2009, the Swedish phone giant Teliasonera set out to build one of the world’s first fourth-generation wireless networks in some of Scandinavia’s most important—and technologically savviest—cities. For Oslo, Norway, Teliasonera made an audacious and unexpected choice of who would build it: Huawei, a Chinese company with little presence outside China and some other developing markets.
For the past seven decades, the world has been moulded by a strong, transatlantic relationship with the US and EU underwriting the terms of peace, stability and economic prosperity. The success of this order has created its own existential challenge. Its rising beneficiaries in Asia and elsewhere increasingly challenge the validity of these arrangements and the efficacy of rules that have managed global affairs
In the absence of government action to address today’s most pressing global problems, multinational corporations are stepping up to offer their own solutions. As in the seventeenth century, when European joint-stock companies built private empires, the future of sovereignty is at stake.
