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China news tagged with: China’s rise (268)

• Minxin Pei: Think Again: Asia’s Rise

  

  In Foreign Policy, Minxin Pei offers an alternative perspective to the popular view that Asia’s global dominance is imminent:

  Asia’s recent track record might seem to guarantee its economic superpower status. Goldman Sachs, for instance, expects that China will surpass the United States in economic output in 2027 and India will catch up by 2050.

  Given Asia’s relatively low per capita income, its growth rate will indeed outpace the West’s for the foreseeable future. But the region faces enormous demographic hurdles in the decades ahead. More than 20 percent of Asians will be elderly by 2050. Aging is a principal cause of Japan’s stagnation. China’s elderly population will soar in the middle of the next decade. Its savings rate will fall while healthcare and pension costs explode. India is a lone exception to these trends-any one of which could help stall the region’s growth.

  Environmental and natural resource constraints could also prove crippling. Pollution is worsening Asia’s shortage of fresh water while air pollution exacts a terrible toll on health (it kills almost 400,000 people each year in China alone). Without revolutionary advances in alternative energy, Asia could face a severe energy crunch. Climate change could devastate the region’s agriculture.

  The current economic crisis, moreover, will lead to huge overcapacity as Western demand evaporates. Asian companies, facing anemic consumer demand at home, will not be able to sell their products in the region. The Asian export-dependent model of development will either disappear or cease to be a viable engine of growth.

  Political instability could also throw Asia’s economic locomotive off course.

  » Read more
  • June 28, 2009 2:52 PM

• Book Review: When China Rules the World, By Martin Jacques

  

  A review from The Independent of Martin Jacques’ new book,When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, about the implications of China’s rise:

  This ringing rejection of Western universalism is where he begins. As he puts it, “There is still a widespread view in the West that China will eventually conform, by a process of natural and inevitable development, to the Western paradigm. This is wishful thinking.” By concentrating on similarities, rather than recognising difference, the Western world “excludes everything… that makes China what it is”.

  Increasingly, he posits, China will exemplify an alternative model for development, and one likely to spell the end of the West’s dominance in every sphere: economic, political and cultural. China’s differences concern the nature of the state (a “civilisation state”, not a “nation-state”), its regional relationships (a “tribute system”), and a particular attitude towards race and ethnicity. China’s scale, its long and consistent polity, and the fact that, even when its GDP outstrips the world, it will still be a developing country, are other elements that make China, in Jacques’s view, different.

  See also an op-ed by Jacques and a debate he participated in on the same topic.

  » Read more
  • June 26, 2009 7:59 AM

• Martin Jacques: A New Sun Rises in the East

  

  Martin Jacques writes in the New Statesman:

  Apart from its extraordinary longevity and bursts of efflorescent invention, the most striking feature of Chinese history is the fact that while Europe, following the fall of the Roman empire, fragmented into many parts, and ultimately into many nations, China was already moving in exactly the opposite direction and starting to coalesce. It is this unity that has ensured the continuity of its civilisation and also provided the size which remains so fundamental to China’s character and impact. Unity is one of the most fundamental propositions concerning Chinese history, if not the most fundamental.

  If Europe provided the narrative and concepts that have informed not just western but world history over the past two centuries, so China may do rather similarly for the next century or so, and thereby furnish the world with an entirely different story and set of concepts: namely the idea of unity rather than fragmentation, that of the civilisation state rather than the nation state, that of the tributary system rather than the Westphalian system, a distinctive Chinese notion of race, and an organising political dynamic of centralisation/decentralisation rather than modernisation/conservatism.

  See also a debate about the rise of China between Jacques and Will Hutton on the Guardian’s website.

  » Read more
  • June 25, 2009 7:08 PM

• Tiananmen Square and Two Chinas

  

  Jayshree Bajoria did the following interviews for the Council for Foreign Relations (the following quotes are excerpted):

  June 4, 1989 marks the anniversary of the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown on the largest protests for political reform since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Widely known as the Tiananmen Square massacre, the event remains a stain on Chinese history. But twenty years on, China has experienced two decades of 10 percent annual economic growth, lifting millions out of poverty and propelling it into the forefront of global economic power. Six experts–CFR’s Elizabeth C. Economy and Adam Segal, Perry Link, Cheng Li, Orville Schell, and Michael Anti–reflect on China’s evolution since the spring of 1989 and prospects for democratic reform.

  “The failure of China’s leaders to embrace the ideals embodied by the Tiananmen demonstrations has had far-reaching and often devastating consequences.” - CFR’s Elizabeth Economy

  “So, it was the next decade and a half of dynamic growth that made it possible for many Chinese to imagine that 1989 was really just ‘the past,’ an epiphenomenon, and hopefully an aberrant moment in contemporary Chinese history that should best be forgotten.” – Orville Schell, Asia Society

  “The Internet has liberalized the Chinese people in the past decade and will continue this process; however any substantial political reform has yet to come. The political future of China depends on not only the maturity of civil society, but also whether the Chinese ruling party is willing to offer reconciliation to its own people, who still think the June 4, 1989 event was an unforgivable mistake made by the authorities. This wound of history has made politics in China immoral, and will prevent this nation and her people from achieving greatness.” - Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), Freelance journalist and blogger in China

  “Recent popular fiction and television reveal a strong attraction among the Chinese public for characters who–as if in contradiction to the surrounding society–are sincere, decent, and ready to do what is right, not just what is expedient. Religions have had revivals, but the project of letting religions lead the way to shared public values has been frustrated by government repression whenever a religious organization is seen to be wandering outside party control. Chinese people today feel far less secure, inside, than a bustling sidewalk in Shanghai might lead one to believe.” - Perry Link, Chancellorial Chair for Innovative Teaching, University of California, Riverside. Coeditor of “The Tiananmen Papers”

  “Chinese leaders have begun using the term ‘inner-party democracy’ to describe the idea that the party should institutionalize checks and balances within its leadership.”- Cheng Li, Brookings Institution

  » Read more
  • June 2, 2009 8:26 PM

• Launch Issue of ‘China National Geography’ English Edition

  

  This month saw the launch of the English edition of China National Geography (中国国家地理).  Danwei has an extensive interview with editor-in-chief Yungshih Lee and international publisher Melvyn Goh:

  Danwei: What do you hope to achieve with the launch of CNG?
  Yungshih Lee: The mission of the magazine is “bringing China to the world” and that is exactly what we hope to achieve with the launch of this magazine. It is really amazing how China, a country with such long history, large population and landmass, and diversified cultural and natural resources, is being understood so little by the rest of the world. I hope our magazine would fill this gap by providing authentic and authoritative stories on China.

  Danwei: The launch issue’s focus is on Henan. Can you tell me a little bit about why you made that decision to focus it on Henan, and how you feel about the province?
  YL: Henan is really where the Han culture of China began. I think it’s a great starting point for anyone who wants to understand China. There are many stories to report on Henan, ones with a great cultural significance and even the natural history is exciting. Yet Henan is often neglected by many who visit China.

  So the Henan issue is really a perfect example of what the magazine is about. We tell the stories of China that should be told but are missed in the Western media. These kind of stories could only come from a source with a deep understanding of the Chinese history, culture, and natural environment. This is what makes CNG unique.

  

  A double-page spread in the launch issue of the English edition of China National Geography, picturing a Shaolin monk at the Shaolin Temple.

  » Read more
  • May 31, 2009 5:37 PM

• Shanghai as World Financial Capital? Maybe Next Century (Updated)

  

  Dan at the China Law Blog agrees with Richard Florida’s argument that cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong will not soon become centers of world finance, in spite of Asia’s fast-growing economic clout.  The following is excerpted from Florida’s article, How the Crash Will Reshape America:

  The transition from one financial center to another typically lags behind broader shifts in the economic balance of power, Cassis suggests. Although the U.S. displaced England as the world’s largest economy well before 1900, it was not until after World War II that New York eclipsed London as the world’s preeminent financial center (and even then, the eclipse was not complete; in recent years, London has, by some measures, edged out New York). As Asia has risen, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore have become major financial centers—yet in size and scope, they still trail New York and London by large margins.

  [...]“A crucial contributory factor in the financial centres’ development over the last two centuries, and even longer,” writes Cassis, “is the arrival of new talent to replenish their energy and their capacity to innovate.” All in all, most places in Asia and the Middle East are still not as inviting to foreign professionals as New York or London. Tokyo is a wonderful city, but Japan remains among the least open of the advanced economies, and admits fewer immigrants than any other member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 30 market-oriented democracies. Singapore remains for the time being a top-down, socially engineered society. Dubai placed 44th in a recent ranking of global financial centers, near Edinburgh, Bangkok, Lisbon, and Prague. New York’s openness to talent and its critical mass of it—in and outside of finance and banking—will ensure that it remains a global financial center.

  Update #1: Michael Pettis also explains for Newsweek why New York and London will not likely be overtaken by major Asian cities in the current credit crunch:

  Financial crises tend to trigger overwrought predictions of major economic shifts—and then debunk them. Today’s global economic meltdown is no different. In recent months, it has become popular to predict that New York and London (or NyLon, as they’re together known) will soon lose market share as cities in the emerging world use the crisis to wrest away dominance. But history suggests that the opposite is more likely: that New York and London will actually increase in importance over the decade to come.

  [...]Big centers have two huge advantages over smaller rivals: greater liquidity and larger networks. Big investors tend to flock to big financial capitals because they offer higher volume and lower trading costs, and issuers of stocks, bonds and other financial products follow the flock of investors.

  [...]When a liquidity boom ends, however, it tends to accentuate the advantages of big markets while diminishing those of smaller ones. The volume of financial transactions declines as does investors’ appetite for risk, and the costs of buying or selling, especially for large trades, rise sharply. These changes all make smaller, less-liquid secondary financial centers seem less attractive to most parties. Traders and issuers begin to migrate back to the deeper primary financial centers, which increases the liquidity of the big players while further reducing that of the smaller centers. Liquidity draws liquidity, as the old trader’s saw has it.

  » Read more
  • May 31, 2009 4:32 PM

• David Miliband: China Ready to Join US as World Power

  

  From the Guardian:

  David Miliband today described China as the 21st century’s “indispensable power” with a decisive say on the future of the global economy, climate change and world trade.

  The foreign secretary predicted that over the next few decades China would become one of the two “powers that count”, along with the US, and Europe could emerge as a third only if it learned to speak with one voice.

  The remarks, in a Guardian interview, represented the most direct acknowledgement to date from a senior minister, or arguably from any western leader, of China’s ascendant position in the global pecking order.

  Miliband said a pivotal moment in China’s rise came at the G20 summit last month in London. Hu Jintao, China’s president, arrived as the head of the only major power still enjoying strong growth (expected to be 8% this year), backed by substantial financial reserves.

  “The G20 was a very significant coming of economic age in an international forum for China. If you looked around the 20 people sitting at the table … what was striking was that when China spoke everybody listened,” Miliband said.

  “China’s indispensability in part comes from size, but a second part is that it wants to play a role.”

  » Read more
  • May 18, 2009 9:12 AM

• Francesco Sisci: Thinking the Impossible: China’s World

  

  From lastampa.it:

  A series of impossible events—or better, of events that were thought to be impossible—have been taking place in America since the beginning of the century.

  A spectacularly simple terrorist plan on September 11, 2001, managed to crash two New York towers that symbolized the nation, its wealth, and its power. This led America into a war in Iraq and Central Asia that has been going on so far yet failing to impose a new world order in the region.

  Conversely, the war is exhausting America’s resources, created growing anti-American hatred in Muslim countries, and has brought a large divide with Europe, its staunchest ally, which is now sick of wars no matter what the cause.

  After this, and most likely also because of this[1], the American financial system, which ruled the global economy and thus its social order, melted down and is being rescued by a very unlikely character: China, the country that only a decade ago the U.S. might have wanted to confront belligerently and the last large bulwark of official communism in the world.

  Yet, now “communist” China is the largest bank-roller of American debt. It has bought some U.S. $1.7 trillion in American bonds and is still buying them to support the American economy as well as China’s own long-term investment in America.

  » Read more
  • May 15, 2009 10:41 AM

• Ian Castles: Measuring China’s Size and Power

  

  Ian Castles is Visiting Fellow in the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the ANU and was a former Commonwealth Statistician. He writes on East Asia Forum::

  In his review of the Australian Government’s defence white paper, Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian, says, ‘just for the record’, that the US economy is six times as big as China’s. He claims that the white paper’s assertion that China has the potential to overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by 2020 is ‘silly’ (‘A battle of words’, Weekend Australian, 2-3 May, p. 22).

  Sheridan also claims that the use of the purchasing power parity (PPP) method to compare the relative size of economies is ‘sleight of hand’ which gives rise to a ‘statistical illusion’ and ‘a meaningless measure’.

  He is wrong on all counts. Even on the discredited ‘market’ exchange rate method that he persistently champions against the unanimous advice of economic statisticians and index number theorists, the GDP of the US is now only three times as big as China’s, not six times as big (IMF, World Economic Outlook Database, April 2009).

  » Read more
  • May 11, 2009 3:36 PM

• China Uses Global Crisis to Assert Its Influence

  

  The Washington Post reports on China’s new relationship with Jamaica after China came to the small nation’s rescue following an economic crisis:

  When contracts for loan packages totaling $138 million were signed between the two countries in March, China became Jamaica’s biggest financial partner. Headlines in Jamaica’s leading newspapers, which only a year ago were filled with concern about China’s growing influence in the region, gushed about its generosity.

  “The loan couldn’t have come more in time and on more preferred terms,” E. Courtenay Rattray, Jamaica’s ambassador to China, said in an interview. While the island nation continues to value its close relationships with Western powers, he added, in some respects Jamaica has more in common with China. “Those are developed countries. They don’t have such an in-depth understanding of the development aspirations of Jamaica as does China,” he said.

  Overseas aid and loans are just one way China is asserting itself in its new role as a world financial leader. While polishing China’s own image, Premier Wen Jiabao and other top leaders have blamed the West for the global economic crisis. Chinese officials increasingly are challenging the primacy of the dollar, warning other countries about the danger of keeping reserves in just one or two currencies, such as dollars and euros. And as the global economic crisis has eroded faith in U.S.-style capitalism, there’s growing talk that a new “Beijing Consensus” will replace the long-dominant Washington Consensus on how developing countries should manage their economies.

  Read more about the so-called Beijing Consensus in an opinion piece on the Guardian’s site:

  As the US backtracks on its liberal standards, it is flirting with what can be called the “Beijing Consensus”, which makes economic development a country’s paramount goal and prescribes that states should actively steer growth in a way that suits national stability. What matters in this worldview is not the nature of any country’s political system, but the extent to which it improves its people’s wellbeing. At the diplomatic level, this implies that national interests, not universal norms, should drive cooperation.

  This diplomatic and economic realism is more than a reversal of the neo-conservative muscle-flexing of the George W Bush years. It is an attempt by a declining power to use its constrained capabilities in a more economical way.

  » Read more
  • April 23, 2009 11:48 AM

• Dragon Nightmares: EU and China Relations

  

  The Economist reports on the future of EU-China relations.

  HERE is a quick way to spoil a Brussels dinner party. Simply suggest that world governance is slipping away from the G20, G7, G8 or other bodies in which Europeans may hog up to half the seats. Then propose, with gloomy relish, that the future belongs to the G2: newly fashionable jargon for a putative body formed by China and America.

  The fear of irrelevance haunts Euro-types, for all their public boasting about Europe’s future might. The thought that the European Union might not greatly interest China is especially painful. After all, the 21st century was meant to be different. Indeed, to earlier leaders like France’s Jacques Chirac, a rising China was welcome as another challenge to American hegemony, ushering in a “multipolar world” in which the EU would play a big role. If that meant kow-towing to Chinese demands to shun Taiwan, snub the Dalai Lama or tone down criticism of human-rights abuses, so be it. Most EU countries focused on commercial diplomacy with China, to ensure that their leaders’ visits could end with flashing cameras and the signing of juicy contracts.

  » Read more
  • April 17, 2009 6:21 PM

• An Unsure China Steps Onto the Global Stage

  

  The New York Times reports on China’s new role in the global spotlight at the ongoing G20 meetings:

  Yet even as Presidents Hu Jintao and Obama had their first meeting on Wednesday on the sidelines of the summit proceedings, the Chinese appeared torn between seizing their moment in the geopolitical spotlight and shying from it.

  Government censors quickly deleted Mr. Xi’s remarks from Chinese news reports last month. On Wednesday, the front page of China Daily, the English-language newspaper that telegraphs government positions to the outside world, warned that China “is not as strong an economy as some people think.”

  “Bailing out China is our most important contribution to bail out the world,” Tang Min, an economist at the state-financed China Development Research Foundation, was quoted as saying.

  Such is the quandary of a nation whose rise to power appears both inevitable and, in the view of many experts, still a bit premature.

  It’s also been reported that a disagreement between France and China over a plan to spotlight a list of tax havens almost derailed the G20 agreement until President Obama intervened and worked out a compromise. From AP:

  That was when Obama, long a champion of ending or curbing tax havens, decided to float a compromise and pulled Sarkozy aside, according to a senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as a matter of policy.

  [...] Obama proposed that the G-20 merely “take note” of the OECD list, thus opening the door to implicit but not direct endorsement of that list.

  [...] Obama then met with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Sarkozy in a corner of the summit meeting room, as the other world leaders waited.

  Upon the trio’s reaching agreement, the G-20 summit then agreed to note the list of tax havens.

  See also “Japan,China Agree To Work Together To Help Asian Economies” from the Wall Street Journal; ” China and US agree to deepen ties” from Al-Jazeera,

  » Read more
  • April 2, 2009 4:14 PM

• Timothy Garton Ash: China Arrives as a World Power Today - and We Should Welcome It

  

  From the Guardian:

  Today - 2 April 2009 - may yet be marked as the day on which, through the catalysis of a global economic crisis, China definitively emerged as a 21st-century world power. Just a few months ago, the talk in western capitals was still about graciously inviting China to join the western club of G7 plus Russia. Now G20 is widely accepted as the new top table of world politics, and China is already seen as one of the biggest players at that table. The question now is: what kind of world power will China be?

  Until recently, China’s official policy was of demonstrative modesty - the dragon as gecko. Yes, it sought a “harmonious world”, no less, but China’s best service to that end, it suggested, was its own peaceful domestic development. China was outspoken only on issues that related directly to its own economic development and immediate state interests. Now it seems to be moving gingerly beyond the paradigm of developmental modesty. As, in this crisis, the world asks more of it, so it starts to ask more of the world.

  The most striking example is a recent article by the country’s central bank governor, suggesting the creation of a supra-sovereign international reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations”. In other words, not the US dollar. The idea of extending the IMF model of special drawing rights based on a basket of currencies has been widely mooted - not least by a UN panel headed by Joseph Stiglitz, as outlined recently in these pages. But this idea does acquire a particular complexion when it is China’s central bank governor who suggests toppling the US dollar from its throne. In London yesterday, Gordon Brown and president Hu Jintao discussed giving China more voting weight in the IMF, in return for a larger financial contribution. An eminently reasonable suggestion.

  » Read more
  • April 1, 2009 9:20 PM

• Andrew J. Nathan: When China is No. 1

  

  For McKinsey and Company’s What Matters site, Andrew Nathan argues that global economic dominance may not be enough for China:

  It is true China has achieved decades of breathtaking growth. It now ranks at or near the top in terms of foreign-exchange holdings, trade volume, and inflows of foreign direct investment. But even at number four, China accounts for only 6 percent of the global economy, equal to about two Californias. On a per capita basis, China sinks further. It is 49th in foreign-exchange reserves per person. It is 92nd in exports plus imports per person, and 106th in GDP per person. Lacking a reserve currency, like the US dollar, China cannot set the parameters for commodity prices, inflation, interest rates, or stock prices around the world. Nor can it call the shots in the World Bank or International Monetary Fund.

  Indeed, given its size, China’s most important contribution to the rest of the world now and into the future will be to take care of itself. Its ability to satisfy most of its own needs—in energy, grain, and cotton—is crucial to world price stability. The gradual growth of its economy helps the rest of the world remain stable. Economic growth helps keep China politically at peace, avoiding a breakdown that could saddle the rest of the world with refugees, public health problems, and transborder crime problems spilling out of China into neighboring countries. In a sense, then, big as it is, China remains a supporting player on the global economic stage.

  China’s ascension could be derailed by domestic instability or global economic shocks, but assuming that it does become number one, what will it mean for China’s place in the world?

  » Read more
  • March 26, 2009 12:34 PM

• Wang Gungwu: China Rises Again

  

  On Yale Global, historian Wang Gungwu writes about the new role that China is carving out for itself in the world order. From the introduction:

  In China’s long history, its leaders have managed other rises in power and preeminence, but the current rise confronts them with a different set of challenges on a global scale. This two-part series reflects on how China handles its rise and responds to other global powers. In the first article of the series, leading historian of China’s foreign relations, Wang Gungwu, details the considerations for Chinese leadership as the country moves beyond a global role largely limited to trade, exports and economics. Those aspiring to lead on global issues naturally see opportunity in the current economic recession: Confidence has diminished in Western institutions and strategies, including military solutions for the Middle East or development plans for Africa. Chinese leaders and intellectuals want to stave off demands from the West and carefully select their own methods for achieving prosperity, security and civilized culture. Wang predicts that modern Chinese leaders will rely on ancient principles to achieve timeless goals: the economic global can serve as a means in establishing a prosperous and powerful state that wields global influence; and modern ideas on best practices can be integrated with Chinese heritage to ensure sustained civilized society. The greatest challenge, he warns, is applying good governance in maintaining a unified state and harmonious society amidst so many conflicting demands.

  » Read more
  • March 25, 2009 9:01 PM

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