The Brief
Get Up To SpeedFor all appearances, China has emerged unscathed from the global economic crisis, in stark contrast to its biggest debtor, America. China's admirers point to its ability to mobilize state resources, quick decision-making and business-friendly environment as reasons for its economic ascendency. But can its brand of state-directed capitalism overcome rampant corruption and the threat of growing inequality, or will the American model of innovation and free markets prevail?
View Debate PageOrville Schell
- Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society
Orville Schell interview, Real News Network, April 7, 2011 & May 14, 2011 Schell discusses American debt and whats happening inside China in an interview with Real News Network.
Orville Schell interview, Real News Network, April 7, 2011 & May 14, 2011 Schell discusses American debt and whats happening inside China in an interview with Real News Network.
Orville Schell, Atlantic, February 14, 2012 From here on, as China's wealth and power increases, its national challenge will be to start letting itself feel sufficiently reinstated in the congress of great nations that it does not need to wallow in narratives of victimization, or be so militant about grasping symbolic demonstrations of its equality or superiority.
The worlds biggest corporation and the worlds most populous nation have launched a bold experiment in consumer behavior and environmental stewardship: to set green standards for 20,000 suppliers making several hundred thousand items sold to billions of shoppers worldwide. Will that effort take hold, or will it unravel in a recriminatory tangle of misguided expectations and broken promises?
The changing relationship between China and America will be one of the defining foreign policy issues of our times. To understand its dynamic, says the sinologist, we must take account of China's lingering sense of victimhood.
The bitter new reality is that the US and old Europe have recently edged closer to becoming developing countries. If the Obama administration and EU officials cannot figure out the proper mix between economic engagement and protecting national security, investment capital from China will go elsewhere.
China is finding it ever more difficult to straddle the divide between its anachronistic political system and its booming market economy. A reconsideration of the country's political future must come soon. Fortunately, China can find guidance in its own history: a previous generation of reformers who sought to balance the imperatives of modernity with the best aspects of Chinese tradition.
Peter Schiff
- CEO & Chief Global Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital
Why Euro Pacific Capital CEO Peter Schiff will argue that China does economic policy better than the U.S. at the Slate/Intelligence Squared live debate on March 13.
Schiff discusses the U.S.-China trade imbalance at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting, a part of the McKinsey Executive Roundtable Series in International Economics.
Peter Schiff on CNN Schiff on how China is more free market and a better place to start a business than America.
The global economy has become so unbalanced that even government ministers who would normally have trouble explaining supply or demand clearly recognize that something has to give. To a very large extent the distortions are caused by Chinas long-standing policy of pegging its currency, the yuan, to the U.S. dollar.
Ian Bremmer
- Founder and President, Eurasia Group
This in no way is going to help to resolve the most challenging war in the Middle East today.
“If you want to be sure the near-term pain a trade battle would impose on U.S. workers will prove worthwhile in the long run, you'd better have allies—both political and military,” writes Ian Bremmer.
"Last October, China's President Xi Jinping delivered the most consequential speech since Mikhail Gorbachev stepped before cameras to formally dissolve the Soviet Union. Addressing the Communist Party's 19th Party Congress, Xi made clear that China is ready to claim its share of global leadership. The implications of this step are global."
An interview between Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Ian Bremmer.
"There are many ways a government can assert its interests on the international stage. Some use military muscle. Others use subversion or bluster. In Asia, Africa, Latin America and even in Europe, China is using investment to get what it wants from countries and governments in need."
"China continues to take a long-term, government-led and -funded approach to global trade and investment, noted Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer, one of the world’s foremost political scientists, in a keynote conversation with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd."
"'Increasingly the foreign policy establishment in the United States... does believe that China is a strategic competitor of the United States; that's in the national security doctrine but is also a feeling that is much broader,' says Dr Ian Bremmer, author of nine books, and founder and president of global political risk research and consultancy Eurasia Group, and GZero Media."
"Every year, Eurasia Group puts out a list of top geopolitical risks. In 2019, China looms large in many of them."
"Apple is really good at high-end consumer products that have secure data. Why would China want you to have that?" Bremmer asked. "That's completely opposed to the Chinese model."
"In China, by contrast, 280 million people watched AlphaGo win. There, what really mattered was that a machine owned by a California company, Alphabet, the parent of Google, had conquered a game invented more than 2,500 years ago in Asia."
"But the most important stop will be in Beijing, where Trump will meet President Xi Jinping for the first time since the Chinese leader heralded a “new era” in global politics at his pivotal party congress in October. Trump will try to project strength while calling for closer cooperation on North Korea and on resolving trade disputes. But he arrives at a moment when China, not the U.S., is the single most powerful actor in the global economy."
"Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group discusses the trade war between the United States and China."
"Not so long ago, U.S. leaders predicted that economic development and the birth of a middle class in China would inevitably move that nation toward democracy. Instead, China’s leadership has profited from a weaker West. It has seized on opportunities created by European fragmentation and political dysfunction in Washington to offer China as an alternative model of stability and development."
"This week marks the 40th anniversary of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s decision to “reform and open up” China to the rest of the world. To celebrate the occasion, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a major, 80-minute address on Dec.18 to political and business leaders in Beijing."
"China will expand its Belt and Road development strategy of large-scale investment in foreign countries, extending Beijing’s economic and political influence abroad as the U.S. long-term commitment to its regional allies wavers. More important, Xi will continue to protect plans that allow China to compete for access to, and development of, the emerging information and communication technologies crucial for both national security and prosperity in the 21st century."
Ian Bremmer speaks with LinkedIn Editors about the future of China.
Ian Bremmer argues, “Today, most manufacturing jobs and service sector jobs in the US that are leaving are leaving because they are getting automated.”
Ian Bremmer argues, “The dramatic rise of anti-establishment political movements has been greatly impacted by information technologies that allow individuals to understand the world through an ever-narrower lens of beliefs and facts they already agree with.”
“The storms creating turmoil in the US and Europe - including technological change in the workplace and a deepening sense of grievance at income inequality - are now crossing into the developing world, where governments and institutions aren't ready.”
“The introduction of robotics and AI across the globe, even on a limited scale, will sharply reduce the low-wage advantage that helps poor countries and poor people become middle-income countries and middle-class consumers.”
Ian Bremmer argues, “The populist backlash in the U.S. and across the entirety of Europe is a backlash to globalism, and it’s only set to intensify (and expand beyond the U.S. and Europe) over the coming years, making “us vs them”—the conflict between the winners and losers in this emerging world order—a fundamental challenge to the liberal democratic model.”
Katy Waldman interviews Ian Bremmer, Slate, March 6, 2012
Bremmer and Musacchio debate, This house believes that state capitalism is a viable alternative to liberal capitalism, for the Economist.
With Europe, China and the U.S. in crisis, the real question is which of them will stumble first.
Unrest, inflation and an aging populace stand in the way of the Middle Kingdom's touted domination.
We are now living in a G-Zero world, one in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage -- or the will -- to drive a truly international agenda.
The world's two great powers are growing dangerously hostile to one another. Could this be worse than the cold war?
Minxin Pei
- Scholar & Author, "China's Crony Capitalism"
Katy Walman interviews Minxin Pei, Slate March 7, 2012
Chinas long march toward global integration remains unfinished.
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Ever since the Arab Spring brought down long-ruling dictatorships in the Middle East, the partys propaganda machine has spared no effort in portraying the events in the region in the most negative light. The overthrow of the Assad regime, especially should it happen as a result of Security Council action, would inspire the pro-democracy opposition in Beijing and in Moscow.
To understand Chinas new role on the world stage, it helps to rethink several misconceptions that dominate Western thinking.
Peis speech for the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth.
Chinas economic revolution is unleashing powerful social forces that will make maintaining a one-party state more tenuous.
For The Motion
Today, China is the second largest economy in the world, a great power with global influence, and its people live in increasing prosperity; average life expectancy has reached 74 years. But the Western media's discourse on China is dominated by misconceptions.
The free-market fundamentalist economic model is being thrown into the trash heap of history.
The first decade of the 21-century has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the relative prestige of different political and economic models.
China's economy is still very much state-led, with the government controlling most of the financial system, the exchange rate, and about 44 percent of the assets of major industrial enterprises. That is why China was able to plow through the world recession with GDP growth of 9.8 percent, despite losing about 3.7 percentage points of GDP due to falling net exports.
Dictatorships now understand that they have to provide a good economy to keep citizens happy, and they understand that free-market economies work best.
Nationwide, the number of pilots in China needs to rise to 40,000 from 24,000 in the five years ending in 2015. Air China intends to recruit 600 pilots this year, including as many foreigners as possible.
Against The Motion
It is easy to equate that effectiveness of execution with good government. But fans of authoritarian regimes, including well-run ones like China, should never forget the agency problem that is their big structural flaw: For their systems to work, dictators need not only be smart; they must also act in the interests of the state, not of themselves.
Are American regulations so burdensome that they are driving companies abroad?
China's Economy
An exclusive preview of an economic report on China, prepared by the World Bank and government insiders considered to have the ear of the nation's leaders, offers a surprising prescription: China could face an economic crisis unless it implements deep reforms, including scaling back its vast state-owned enterprises and making them operate more like commercial firms.
In its first-ever assessment of China's banks, the International Monetary Fund declared its financial system robust overall, though the system could be severely impacted if several major shocks materialized concurrently specifically, exposure to credit, property, and currency risks.
While Asia's leading economies have been largely immune from the current European economic crisis, the long-term prospects are perilous unless the region uses its strength to assist the global economy. Greater Asian economic integration can stimulate regional demand, boost growth and create more export opportunities for the US and Europe.
Chinese Communist Party
Market-Leninism lives.
China is set to undergo a major turnover in leadership at the 18th National Congress of the CCP in the fall of 2012. The composition of the new Politburo Standing Committee especially the generational attributes and individual idiosyncratic characteristics, group dynamics, and the factional balance of power on the committee will have profound implications for China's economic priorities, social stability, political trajectory, and foreign relations.
Nationwide ceremonies and a deluge of media coverage have been mobilized by China's ruling Communist Party to mark its 90th anniversary today. But all the hoopla cannot conceal the party's insecure state.
Confrontation/Misperceptions
Conflict is a choice, not a necessity.
China has risen from poverty, impotence and isolation to retake its premodern place atop the world economic order. Both the strategic circumstances of our times and the more limited resources available to us demand serious reformulation of current policies.
China's economic rise and its newly amplified voice on the international stage unnerve people and governments across the globe, despite Beijing's best efforts to assuage their fears.
Few would argue that the rise of China has world-altering significance. But across the American left there are sharp, sometimes acrimonious differences about what constitutes appropriate and principled responses to China's emergence as a great power, and whether the country's ascendance is promising or ominous.
China has declared to the rest of the world on many occasions that it takes a path of peaceful development and is committed to upholding world peace and promoting common development and prosperity for all countries. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century and on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), China declared solemnly again to the world that peaceful development is a strategic choice made by China to realize modernization, make itself strong and prosperous, and make more contribution to the progress of human civilization.
Apple
Apple defended its right to use the iPad trademark in China in a heated court hearing Wednesday that pitted the electronics giant against a struggling Chinese electronics company that denies having sold the mainland China rights to the popular tablet computer's name.
Harsh labor conditions in Chinese factories and the pressure on tech companies, like Apple, to improve them.
Developments, progress and some new revelations in the Foxconn story.
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission was created by the United States Congress in October 2000 with the legislative mandate to monitor, investigate, and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China, and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action.
If anything, China is doubling down and giving state-owned enterprises (SOEs) a more prominent role in achieving the state's most important economic goals.
Solar
A forthcoming study by the federal government reveals that Chinese solar panel makers are selling their wares at a loss, either because they have the cash reserves to take the hit or because their government is propping them up.
There's a solar trade war going on inside the U.S., sparked by an invasion of inexpensive imports from China.
Pollution
U.S. scientists have used satellite data to create the first estimates of ground-level particulate pollution in China.
Polls
This is the second consecutive year the majority of Americans have viewed China as economically dominant. By contrast, in 2000, Americans overwhelmingly believed the U.S. was the leading economic power.
Related News & Links
President Obama took direct aim at China's trade policies as Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping warned U.S. business leaders Wednesday that the U.S. needs to respect Beijing's core interests and concerns.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping of China was sent interview questions by the Washington Post before his February 2012 visit to the United States. The answers to those questions were sent by the Chinese government and published by the Washington Post on February 12, 2012.
The dawn of a Chinese century and the end of an American one is not inevitable. This means shoring up our fiscal and economic standing, rebuilding our military, and renewing faith in our values.
Many wealthy Chinese are anxious because, despite China's tremendous progress, the country still faces a lot of challenges. Income inequality is staggering, corruption systemic and public protests a daily occurrence.
Manufacturing once gave the U.S. its middle-class majority. Can it do it again?
