100 posts
Forbes contributor compares China's outgoing president with George Washington
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"A great man"?One wonders why Forbes magazine has chosen to be the "home" of fervent advocates of two of the leading authoritarian and corrupt regimes in the world, Putin's Russia and Communist China? Mark Adomanis always seems to find a w...
Xi Jinping and Barack Obama: two leaders facing very different crises | Timothy Garton Ash
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Xi Jinping faces deeper challenges than Barack Obama. We must hope they are met: it could be a matter of war and peaceSo, in the same week, it is revealed to us who will be the next leaders of both superpowers: Barack Obama and Xi Jinping. The only d...
The Chinese navy’s hidden European past
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In the fourth in the series of European Geostrategy’s ‘Long Posts’, Iskander Rehman analyses European maritime history in relation to contemporary China’s naval modernisation. What does European history imply for China’s future? Do the hist...
China and U.S. face mirror-image leadership challenges
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Although they look like opposites, the United States and China suffer from the same problems: They are introspective, self-destructive and interdependent. China’s ying is often the cause of America’s yang. The big question facing the world this w...
China Steps Up Rhetoric against U.S. Missile Defense
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By Richard Weitz Chinese officials are becoming increasingly vocal about U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) devel...
China: New leaders, old problems
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A year ago, everybody predicted the Chinese succession, now slotted for mid-November, to be a technocratic smooth transfer of power. Instead there have been constant bumps on the road. It startedRead more…...
Corruption in China: The Ferrari-Red communists
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China is a country run by a bunch of corrupted authoritarians. Unfortunately, western leaders cowardly choose to turn a blind eye on this reality. That is why why Mitt Romney must be congratulated for his critical stand on the red empire. German...
The lady in the white uniform…
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Who is this woman, and why is she close to the levers of power in China? The clue is not the uniform - she may be a major general in the People's Liberation Army, but the real reason why PengRead more…...
EU-China: Is Brussels still the port of first call?
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By Chibuzo Opara (Live from EU Council Summit) As leaders of the European States meet today in Brussels to once again debate key issues related to the stability and economic well-being of the Union. Posturing by different leaders and worries about t...
The Blog of Changes
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Change is in the air. In China a leadership transition is taking place amid debate over the future of its economic and political model. At the same time the EU cannot avoid fundamental change in order to resolve its crisis. This occurs at a time when...
The Nightmare Scenario: A U.S.-China War
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By James R. Holmes Our great and powerful editor has requested—nay, demanded!—a series of posts explori...
"The Renminbi Challenge" by Barry Eichengreen
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Last month, China unveiled its first aircraft carrier, and is gearing up to challenge the United States in the South China Sea. By initiating a plan to internationalize its currency, China is similarly seeking to challenge the dollar on the internati...
Corruption in China "goes right to the top"
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The leaders of China's Communist Party are nothing but bunch of corrupted thugsFor years apologists for the Chinese communist government have been spreading the myth that massive corruption in China is only a local...
A pause in export-led growth?
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China’s official manufacturing PMI figure was reported at 49.8 for September, an increase from 49.2 in August. Meanwhile, on Saturday the HSBC/Markit Economics PMI was 47.9,...
Coy Chinese elephant reveals ever slimming ankle
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We’ve written about the idea that global FX reserve growth might be creeping back up very recently. However, the evidence remains circumstantial; we saw the reserve manager...
China’s technology revolution
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Today’s rulers in China recognize that they are playing with a river of fire that can be channeled but never fully controlled. It is not impossible that China’s technology-driven cultural revolution could strengthen the political hold of the Comm...
Beyond the EU-China summit
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FRIDE Director, Richard Youngs, and the Head of FRIDE’s Agora Asia-Europe programme, Gauri Khandekar, have written an opinion piece on EU-China relations for the European Voice, published on September 27th. You can find the piece here, and it i...
China´s inhuman and shameful one-child policy
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Yesterday marked the 32th anniversary of China´s one-child family planning policy, which has resulted in massive human rights abuses. US Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, one of the leading pro-life and human rights advocates in Congress,...
Uncertain World: China-Japan Tensions – Who Stands to Gain?
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video By Fyodor Lukyanov The Asia-Pacific Region’s...
Después de la cumbre: tres pruebas chinas para Europa
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FRIDE President, Pedro Solbes, and the FRIDE Director, Richard Youngs, had a jointly-authored opinion piece about the recent EU-China summit published in El Pais. La cumbre UE-China celebrada hace dos días centró su atención en los cambios...
Three Chinese tests for the EU
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Ahead of Thursday’s EU-China summit in Brussels, FRIDE Director Richard Youngs has written an opinion piece for E!Sharp, titled “Three Chinese tests for the EU”. The piece can be found here, and it is also copied below. Thi...
China telecom Introducing iPhone has finalised
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Lots of the people that use iPhones prefer to use apps that are easy to them and ones who have some sense of fashion embedded in them.Most companies are coming up with cool apps to be able to appeal to the countless iPhone users out there globally. I...
Human rights in China: EU speaks softly and carries no stick
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The Baroness had a nice cup of tea with Chinese PM Wen Jiabao. "She provided no details about individual issues or cases raised, nor did she clarify what other steps may have been proposed to better defend human rights."Human Rights Watch wants...
Compared with Hitler’s Holocaust or Stalin’s gulag, Mao Zedong’s organized famine has been one of the more or less forgotten crimes against humanity
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About 100 official documents concerning the “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962” have been published by the historian Zhou Xun writes Helmut Dahmer.In her review of this work (“Uncovering a great leap into an abyss,” Sept. 6), Didi Kirst...
Weibo Spawns ‘Wei-diplomacy’
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Over the past several weeks national sentiments in China and Japan have been enflamed by activists from both countries landing on disputed islands in the East China Sea. As this battle has raged, aRead more…...
The Other China
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China, with its enormous population of over a billion people, is going through extraordinary social, economic, and political upheaval.
Chinese corporate risk looks pretty significant
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Standard & Poor’s has been getting very interested in China’s companies’ risk profiles recently, amid rapid growth for the country’s immature corporate...
China and the USA Started Armament Race
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By Alexey Koval Washington and Beijing have given the start to the armament race, which most probably, shall t...
China Confronting Climate Change and Pollution
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China has become the planet`s biggest polluter and emitter of greenhouse gases. This is the price the country has paid for the extraordinary economic rise during the last 35 years. There has never been a parallel for such a development in human histo...
Now you see positive signs in the the China loan data, now you don’t
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China’s data for August did seem to have some good indicators that stimulus was beginning to wind its way into the economy via the traditional channel of bank lending. Loan...
The Pentagon: also not worried about China and USTs
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Bloomberg writes about a report by the US defence department to Congress about Chinese holdings of US Treasuries, and has helpfully uploaded the document itself (click below to open in pdf):...
One for the China bull(s)
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Don’t say we never do anything nice for you. We found four positive signs this week, and while at least three of them might raise more questions than they answer, China bulls...
Charting the China slowdown…
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From Martin Malone at Mint Partners…Related link:Bonfire of the Burberry handbags — FT Alphaville...
Bonfire of the Burberry handbags
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Did John Hempton of Bronte Capital speak too soon when it comes to the grisly ‘China effect’ on luxury goods makers?Readers will remember that Hempton decided to...
The growing risk of shorting China stocks
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The Globe and Mail has a spectacular report on the arrest in December of a Canadian citizen, Huang Kun, in Beijing. Huang had helped compile a report into a Vancouver-based company...
Is the 2012 China stimulus some kind of unicorn?
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As in, does it exist?Wang Tao at UBS takes aim at the “Rmb1tn stimulus“; she thinks it is not really real:Well, that is what we call a bit of make-believe. Sure,...
A Rorschach test, China Q3 data edition
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Another month, another round of mostly disappointing China data. Not that everyone is overwhelmed by the gloom, as some are pointing to positive indicators in property as well...
China’s solar companies face tough odds in EU investigation
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China’s solar panel manufacturers are facing an up-hill battle in their legal fight against the EU, which last week targeted them as it launched the bloc’s biggest-ever an anti-dumping investigation. The case involves Chinese exports of solar pan...
Chinese steel mills hope this stimulus thing is for real
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Exhibit 1: From Caijing on Wednesday:“The whole steel market has already collapsed in August, because any steel maker, including Baosteel (600019.SH), would make a loss...
China stimulates, sort of
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A trillion renminbi! That’s almost like a real 2008-style stimulus (which was Rmb4tn). And beleagured Chinese stocks reacted accordingly:From Bloomberg:China approved...
EU China solar trade dispute
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Dear reader,besides the one big financial event in the eurozone this week, the ECB meeting and the crucial decisions on its future bond buying scheme, there was the rapidly developing trade dispute between the EU on the one hand and China on the othe...
Hong Kong: TV Station Said London and Washington Behind Anti-National Education Protest
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One of the two free terrestrial television stations in Hong Kong, Asia T.V, propagated that the anti-national education in Hong Kong is manipulated by foreign power from London and Washington to destroy Hong Kong. (More details in Badcanto) Written b...
Crisis Shall Lead to China
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By Alexander Golubov The statements of Chinese Prime Minister Wēn Jiābǎo sounded after the meeting with the...
Are we approaching the edge of a steel cliff?
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Has the pain really started for those suppliers for whom China’s steel mills are the big growth prospect? Iron ore prices have plunged in the last few weeks, but they are still...
Hearing about what the new China thinks
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So what happened to the famously smoggy Beijing weather? I'm sat on a roof terrace hearing about the transformational power of the internet in China in bright sunshine. I'm in Beijing, along withRead more…...
China: Modest Growth or Full Employment?
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As summer slid into fall in 2012, the Chinese government was giving no hint of any ensuing economic stimulus program. This was more than slightly unnerving for some, as a recent manufacturing survey had slumped more than expected, to 49.2 in August.
Darker Chinese clouds
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The HSBC Markit China manufacturing PMI has been revised downwards to 47.6 in August from the flash number of 47.8 — which was in itself a sizeable fall from July’s...
China’s bad-debt nightmare
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Not our words but Societe Generale’s, or at least their China macro strategist Wei Yao, who believes credit risk is worse than official non-performing loan data suggests....
The Paradox of China's Naval Strategy
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By Rodger Baker, Zhixing Zhang Over the past decade, the South China Sea has become one of the most volatile flashp...
China’s unprecedented liquidity injection
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As we noted earlier, the People’s Bank of China is continuing to inject huge sums of liquidity into the monetary system via so-called “reverse repos” (the equivalent...
PBoC ramps up liquidity operations
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The People’s Bank of China helped Asian stocks rally on Tuesday with a reported record liquidity injection via reverse repos. From Bloomberg:The People’s Bank of China...
China’s economy growing in the wrong places
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Namely, property:Just as talk of a ‘hard landing’ resurfaces, property prices are continuing to rise:The NBS released home price data for 70 medium-to-large-sized...
Gu Kalai’s sentence: The case is not closed
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Gu Kalai was given a suspended death sentence. Question: Can we say that this case is closed in the political sense or not, and why? Answers: Shaun Breslin, Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick No its not closed. The...
The Chinese economy is shrinking
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The party seems to be over for China. Official statistics still indicate growth, but China expert Gordon Chang is convinced that Chinese officials are artificially inflating statistics: The conclusion that China’s economy is probably shr...
China in the ‘Great White North’
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In the second series of European Geostrategy’s ‘Long Posts’, Malte Humptert and Andreas Raspotnik analyse Chinese penetration of the ‘High North’. What are China’s interests in the Arctic zone? Are they exclusively economic? Or are they i...
The less-popular yuan
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The reversal of currency flows in and out of China is continuing. The PBoC published data on Tuesday showing that the country’s banks were net sellers of yuan in July, selling...
China’s literally ground-breaking copper inventories
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Remember how China was being buried alive in copper a few months ago? The stuff was piling up in carparks? Now it’s even WORSE.Judy Zhu and Han Pin Hsi, the Standard Chartered...
It’s hard being a China short seller
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It’s a big, big China leveraged buyout — the biggest ever, in fact. Advertising company Focus Media, which is listed in the US, said it has received a $3.5bn takeover...
Russia's Medvedev hints of Chinese threat to Far East
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By Thomas Grove Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev issued a veiled warning about China's rising influence in Russia's r...
China´s prison camp system worse than the Gulag
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"Since 1949, around 40-50 million people have been imprisoned in the Laogai, of which approx. 20-25 million have perished, i. e. they were tortured to death". The Laogai Research FoundationCommunist China has won many gold medals at the London O...
China Increases Risks for Euro
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China has just made the euro's life even more risky. Recent data show a sharp slowdown in Chinese domestic demand for foreign goods and a decline in overseas purchases of Chinese exports. Meanwhile, global economic growth is probably faltering even m...
China data inspires hope, disappointment… and a dilemma
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Oh yay, Chinese consumer price inflation for July came in at a nicely subdued looking 1.8 per cent. And industrial production growth continued to slow. Q2 wasn’t the bottom after all....
Gu Kailai’s case: Will she be sentenced to death?
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Gu might be guilty but this is not a real trial. What does it tell us about the power struggle in China? Gu and a household aide, Zhang Xiaojun, have been charged with murder of a British businessman Neil Heywood. Questions: 1. Does this trial say...
Chinese banks’ Weapons of Mass Ponzi
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We wrote last week that China’s shadow banking system was reflecting and, to an extent, contributing to a growing liquidity risk which in turn is being exacerbated by net capital outflows....
Is China Losing the Diplomatic Plot?
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By Kishore Mahbubani In 2016, China’s share of the global economy will be larger than America’s in purc...
Russia and China… friends or foes?
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From the Chinese perspective: 1. Internal circumstances of China’s foreign policy • Traditional Chinese vision of world order (Sinocentrism and Confucianism) • The concept and practice of “three circles” • Reasons for the collapse...
PLA in the political structure of China
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China celebrates People’s Liberation Army’s 85th anniversary. Question: PRC is somehow in the period of the power transition. What kind of role, if any, PLA’s leadership play in this? How would you describe the position of military...
China’s two-way liquidity risk: shadow banking
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Meanwhile, in the domestic banking scene… [See part 1 on capital outflows here.]China’s financial system stability is increasingly intertwined with its shadow banking system —...
China’s two-way liquidity risk: capital outflows
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Izzy wrote in May how China’s Rmb exodus is a huge (and still little-explored) story for the world economy, and it’s one that won’t be going away as China recorded...
Chinese Banks and Solar Subsidies
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Some Chinese solar-panel manufacturers have been losing money hand over fist recently, yet some of them are planning to ramp up production this year.
China’s affluence crisis
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The new generation of Chinese leaders, who rise to power this fall, will need to escape the trap of a market that overproduces and focus on the well-being of the Chinese people.
China flash PMIs — the employment factor
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The latest HSBC/Markit Economics flash PMI for China paints a slightly odd picture.Okay, so overall it’s positive – the index is 49.5 for July compared to 48.2 in June....
Cnooc-Nexen, and a Brent outing
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China buys two North Sea oil fields on the same day. Coincidence — or a sign of change coming to the oil market’s biggest benchmark?In addition to Sinopec’s...
Two Chinese infrastructure problems
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It’s not just excessive investment, particularly the fixed-asset sort, that’s a problem in China. It’s the wrong kind of investment that is the issue —...
Growing Chinese trade with Africa compensates for EU’s slowdown
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According to the China daily, the expansion of China's trade with Africa in the first half of 2012 has helped compensate for the slowdown in trade with the EU and other regions affected by the economic crisis.
