Djibouti, one of Africa’s smallest countries, has become China’s “strategic partner.” The Chinese have built a military base and a port, and is currently constructing a free trade zone, fast establishing it as Beijing’s gateway to the continent. Read Here – Der Spiegel
As so often with the Trump administration, it’s easy to get bogged down in the contradictory, unusual or flat-out salacious headlines. Solar panels! Washington machines! Den of the globalizers! No female CEOs! But Trump’s first trade week of 2018, which began with the imposition of retaliatory tariffs and ended with him giving a speech in […]
What’s clear is that almost overnight the US has transformed from a pre-eminent advocate of free trade into a protectionist villain in the eyes of both friends and foes. The bigger threat, however, is trade war turning into hot war, as the nationalist fervour extinguishes the fruits of globalisation. Read Here – Al Jazeera
Like any president, Trump is taking credit for good economic news. He’s highlighted rising stocks and falling unemployment. But Trump also, famously, regards trade deficits as a sign of economic weakness. And for people who worry about the fact that the U.S. buys more stuff from other countries than it sells them, the news has […]
The natural question is then: Why China? Why should China be that external actor? The reason is that China supplies some critical, missing input. That input is deep pockets — someone has to pay a large initial cost to jump-start the building of the infrastructure network, and the actor needs to be able to absorb […]
Over the past year, Chinese Australians who form the largest overseas Chinese community in Oceania, have found themselves at the centre of unwanted attention and scrutiny from the Australian government, intelligence services and media. In what appeared a concerted campaign, some of the community’s prominent business leaders were accused of acting as possible agents of […]
Separated from the rest of Asia by the world’s biggest mountains, India is the elephant on its own subcontinent. Leaving aside perennially hostile Pakistan, it has effortlessly dominated smaller neighbours much in the way that America does in the Caribbean: they may grumble and resent their sometimes clumsy big brother, but they have learned to […]
When President Trump took office on January 20, his supporters hoped he’d keep his campaign promises to get tough with China on trade and push it to deal more forcefully with North Korea; renegotiate or pull out of NAFTA; withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal; and dismantle the Iran nuclear deal. Meanwhile, critics in the US […]
In the more than four decades since Chinese leader Mao Zedong and US President Richard Nixon re-established diplomatic relations between the two countries – after a 25-year hiatus caused by Washington’s support for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War – relations between the world’s most populous and most powerful nations have seesawed. Read […]
Like much else about Pakistan, it’s often infuriatingly difficult to determine whether or not its economy is on the brink of disaster. This week, as the Pakistani rupee lost 5 percent of its value in just three days, it looked like trouble was brewing. And sure, this might be a sign of the economy slipping […]
looking beyond borders 