INTERNATIONAL INSIGHT

China Stands Up

As Asia’s giant continues its rise, China‘s impact is being felt everywhere, with its economy a major factor in world trade and the modernized People’s Liberation Army a mounting concern. China’s appetite for cars, computers, and other goods promises both to spawn the world’s biggest market and to pose a danger to the global environment.

Edited by renowned China scholar and former Dean of University of California's School of Journalism, Orville Schell, the series brings to the readers of Project Syndicate's member papers the views of the most important experts, statesmen, and scholars from China and around the world.

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China’s Bad Debtor

Yu Yongding Series: China Stands Up

2010-03-17

China’s foreign-exchange reserves are facing a triple whammy: a decline in the US dollar’s purchasing power, a fall in the prices of US government securities, and possible inflation in the longer run. If the US government cannot safeguard the value its securities, it should compensate China in one way or another. ... read

Comments: 6 Recommended: 2 Read: 1593

Bankruptcy Comes to China

Xinxin Wang Series: China Stands Up

2010-02-22

China’s businessmen have always needed resilience, but now they must become accustomed to the specter of bankruptcy. For China now has a bankruptcy code with teeth, and the country’s courts are beginning to enforce it with rigor.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 3996

China’s Cyber-Warriors

Brahma Chellaney Series: China Stands Up

2010-01-28

China deploys tens of thousands of “cyber police” to block Web sites, patrol cyber-cafes, monitor the use of cellular telephones, and track down Internet activists. But China's real threat to cyberspace comes comes from the way in which it uses its know-how to engage in cyber intrusion across international frontiers.... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 4343

Managing China’s Crisis Management

Yu Yongding Series: China Stands Up

2010-01-14

The Chinese government has signaled that it is beginning its exit from expansionary measures aimed at mitigating the impact of the global financial crisis and recession. A change of policy can't come soon enough: China’s long-term growth prospects may be seriously affected if the authorities fail to tackle the economy’s structural problems head on. ... read

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China’s Excess-Capacity Nightmare

Mark DeWeaver Series: China Stands Up

2009-12-22

In sector after sector, Mao Zedong's dream of attaining higher industrial output in China than in the West has finally been realized. For Chinese central planners, however, the country's hypetrophied industrial base has become a cause for alarm rather than celebration.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 1 Read: 6348

Obama’s Chinese Balance Sheet

Wei Zhang Series: China Stands Up

2009-11-27

On balance, Obama’s first trip to China achieved relatively little. Moreover, what he did achieve looks superficial, while what he gave up – concessions on China's political prisoners or its exchange-rate policy - seems substantial.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 3505

The Summit of Low Expectations

Susan L. Shirk Series: China Stands Up

2009-10-26

In the run-up to President Barack Obama’s first visit to China next month. American and Chinese diplomats have been compiling lists of ongoing cooperative endeavors in case no new agreements materialize. Indeed, that outcome appears highly likely.... read

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China’s Short March

Orville Schell Series: China Stands Up

2009-09-22

China’s government is making massive preparations for a grand National Day parade in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to celebrate both the 60th anniversary of the PRC’s founding and the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s program of “reform and opening up.” And, while the country is humming with energy, money, plans, leadership, and forward motion, the West seems paralyzed. ... read

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 3857

A New Sino-American Relationship?

Orville Schell Series: China Stands Up

2009-08-21

The Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the US and China has now ended with the establishment of a felicitous new atmosphere between the two countries. But, while the most logical and potentially fruitful area of collaboration is climate change, huge obstacles to progress remain.... read

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Shining a Light on Climate Change	Ban Ki-moon
NEW YORK – A light bulb may not be the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about revolutionary technology. Yet science and smart policy have the potential in today’s world to transform an ordinary household object into a revolutionary innovation.... read

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China’s Cyber-Warriors

Brahma Chellaney Series: China Stands Up

2010-01-28

Comments: 1 Recommended: 0 Read: 4343

A New Sino-American Relationship?

Orville Schell Series: China Stands Up

2009-08-21

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 5336

A Year of Anniversaries and Uncertainties

Wenran Jiang Series: China Stands Up

2009-01-22

For China, last year began with devastating snowstorms, followed by riots in Tibet, embarrassing protests against the Olympic torch relay, and, before the Games themselves, a devastating earthquake. If all that could occur in a year marked by the "lucky" number eight, 2009, littered with a host of extremely sensitive anniversaries, could prove even more dramatic and unpredictable.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 9926

China's Reforms Stall Again

Orville Schell Series: China Stands Up

2003-09-11

As the 82nd anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party approached last July, the Party's new General Secretary, Hu Jintao, seemed on the verge of announcing a whole new range of reforms. In a ceremony celebrating the promulgation of the current 1982 constitution, Hu reportedly expressed interest in strengthening constitutional protections against official intrusions in people's lives and in promoting extensive legal reform. Indeed, he was even rumored to be considering more inner-Party democratization, greater press freedom, strengthening non-Communist political parties, and permitting exiled dissidents to return home. ... read

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Will China’s Capitalist Revolution Turn Democratic

Minxin Pei Series: China Stands Up

2006-06-15

Communist China has experienced a monumental capitalist revolution in the last two decades, with an economy that is now six times bigger than it was 20 years ago. A minor player in the global economy in the 1980’s, China today is the world’s third largest trading power. But if these stunning economic statistics make you think that so much capitalist development must also have brought more democracy to China, think again.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 34029

Mao, the False God

Sin-ming Shaw Series: China Stands Up

2005-06-27

Should Chairman Mao’s huge portrait still hang above the front gate of Tiananmen Square? Should China’s ruling party still call itself Communist? ... read

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The Great Firewall of China

Rebecca MacKinnon Series: China Stands Up

2006-01-31

Writing from 1930’s Shanghai, China’s great essayist Lu Xun once observed: “Today there are all kinds of weeklies. Although their distribution is not very wide, they are shining in the darkness like daggers, letting their comrades know who is attacking the old, strong castles.” Muckraking broadsheets in the first half of the last century played cat-and-mouse games with Chinese government censors, ultimately helping to expose the corruption and moral bankruptcy of the Nationalist (KMT) government and contributing to the Communist victory in 1949.... read

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The Real Long March

Shuyun Sun Series: China Stands Up

2006-03-02

Every nation has its founding myth. For Communist China, it is the Long March – a story on a par with Moses leading the Israelites’ exodus out of Egypt. I was raised on it. ... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 22499

Damming China’s Rivers

Jasper Becker Series: China Stands Up

2005-12-13

Of all China’s problems, none will be more critical over the long run than how it resolves the tension between economic development and environmental protection. Nowhere are consequences of this struggle clearer than in the Himalayan foothills of the southwestern province of Yunnan.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 21924

Buying America, Chinese-Style

Orville Schell Series: China Stands Up

2005-07-04

America’s relations with China have a disturbing tendency to oscillate between embrace and rejection, and that manic ambivalence is now on open display, as China’s relentlessly mounting economic power has finally resulted in the inevitable: Chinese firms are starting to buy up American companies.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 21877

China's Political Time Warp

Orville Schell Series: China Stands Up

2004-06-15

On June 1, Dr. Jiang Yanyong, a surgeon at Beijing 301 Military Hospital, and his wife, Dr. Hua Zhongwei, both seventy-two years old, left home to pick up a visa at the American Embassy. They have not been heard from since.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 21235

China’s Struggling Public Intellectuals

Merle Goldman Series: China Stands Up

2005-09-23

Is China’s political environment loosening up, or is the government cracking down? It’s hard to tell. President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao sometimes seems to be going both ways simultaneously.... read

Comments: 0 Recommended: 0 Read: 21160

China’s Banking Revolution	David Hale
One of the greatest challenges China must confront before the WTO treaty enters into force in 2007 is to prepare the country’s banking system for privatization and competition with foreign banks. The government has established a new agency, Central Hujin Investment Company, to manage and re-capitalize big state-owned banks before they are sold. Hujin has already injected $60 billion of China’s foreign-exchange reserves into the Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank. The Agricultural Bank will also require new capital, although the government is not yet preparing it for privatization. ... read
The Soft Underbelly of China’s Growth	Jun Zhang
China’s explosive economic growth hinges on the rest of the world, radically changing the global production chain and challenging the global trading system. If China maintains its growth momentum over the next two decades, the global system will face huge challenges. Indeed, the question is not so much whether the global system will endure the imbalances spawned by China, but how severe those imbalances will prove to be.... read

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